The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

At around noon, the idea seems shameful. By the afternoon, it’s up for discussion. By evening it’s been assimilated, and late at night it’s perfectly obvious that everything’s exactly as Jacob says.

Sic

It is a good thing that the cold had already set in and turned Bishop Dembowski’s blackened body into a frozen slab of meat.

Every person is a little world: The firmament is where the head is, The mind’s the sun, its rays are words, And the planets are the senses. The world errs and takes with it mankind; Death pursues the day from east to west. Women keep the world in mind And on its feet, to stand the test.

This limitless “between” has its strange critical point—the double. This is the first experience of the thinking man—when he notices the abyss that appears between himself and the rest of the world. This is the painful Two, the fundamental crack in the created world that gives rise to contradictions and all sorts of dualisms. This and that. You and me. Left and right. Sitra Achra, or the other side, the left side, the demonic forces in the guise of the broken shells of the vessels that could not hold the light when they were broken (shevirat haKelim)—that is the Two. Perhaps

Enlightenment begins when people lose their faith in the goodness and the order of the world. The Enlightenment is an expression of mistrust.