The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

but now the Strange Deeds have become symbolic, have metamorphosed into rituals.

Goods should be treated as common, and only managed by individuals, and he who has the most will share with he who has the least.

They say that he is among those whose opinions of themselves are so high that it completely blinds them, and wherever they look they see only themselves. And their conviction of their own importance deprives them of their reason and their power of judgment. Bishop Sołtyk is absolutely one of these people, and therefore it hardly matters whether he has lost his senses in Siberia or not.

“Do not, Brother Piotr, get too carried away. We owe a great deal to our own resilience and faith. And to our own hard work.” “He was in jail for thirteen years because of us. We betrayed him,” says Jakubowski. “Nobody betrayed him,” says young Lanckoroński. “You said yourself that it had to be this way.

but deep down in his brain a suspicion grows, almost a certainty, and it is like a malignant tumor, as if he had rotting meat in his head: she is with someone else.

Over time, moments occur that are very similar to one another. The threads of time have their knots and tangles, and every so often there is a symmetry, every once in a while something repeats, as if refrains and motifs were controlling them, a troubling thing to notice. Such order tends to overburden the mind, which cannot know how to respond. Chaos has always seemed more familiar and safe, like the disarray in your own drawer.

For the duration of the proceedings, the women are completely separated from the men and will spend the whole three days in their own company, covering in great detail all questions of who, when, with whom, how, why, and where.

They provide ideas for marriages, offer fashionable names for children not yet born, discuss appealing places for the treatment of rheumatism, and connect those seeking good posts with those who need good help.

Thomas tells of how in this divided world, made up of factions that set themselves in opposition to each other, and that are called religions, freemasonry is the one place where people of pure hearts may meet and act, stripped of preconceived notions, open.

“Why is it you can’t be mistaken, Jacob?” asks someone from the room. “For within me is God,” answers Jacob Frank, with a beautiful smile that reveals his still-white, healthy teeth.

She is even allowed to get angry with him, as for instance when she accuses him—the sisters have already complained to her about it—of always arranging intercourse so that it is good for the men, but not necessarily for the women.

“Well, how would you do it?” asks Jacob. “I do as God instructs me.” “You have to pay careful attention to who is drawn to whom, who likes each other, and who doesn’t. If you appoint a couple made up of two people who hate each other, it will only bring suffering and shame.” “The point is not for them to do it to get pleasure from it,” the Lord explains to her. “The point is that they must be broken down and come around to one another. The point is for them to form a whole.” “It certainly comes easier to the husbands to be ‘broken down,’ as you call it, while the women feel horrible afterward.”

“Give the women the right to say no,” says Wittel. His look darkens: “Well, don’t announce it, because then their husbands will tell them to say no.” Wittel says after a moment: “The women are not that stupid. The women are happy to be with other men . . . Many of them are just waiting for permission; if they don’t get the permission, some will do it anyway. It’s always been like that, and it always will be.”

worlds where no one is who he is, but rather someone else entirely, and everything that seems stable and sure loses its contours and all the certainty of its own existence.

Eva promises herself that she will also die with dignity. “Preferably young,” she says, though it irritates her father.

“Doesn’t it bother you that she’s been off in Vienna taking her turn among the cabbages?”

In fact, that celadon beauty has made an enormous impression on Samuel. In the evening, he thinks of her when he masturbates.

“Was ist Aufklärung?”

Aufklärung’s relationship to culture is the same as theory’s to practice. Enlightenment has more to do with scholarly work, with abstractions, while culture is the perfection of interpersonal contacts through the intercession of the word, literature, the image, fine arts.

The chill that got into your bones. The foreignness and indifference of the world contrasted with the great trustfulness of those little huts lying low to the ground, the short fences grown over with dry ropes of clematis, lights in the windows, miserable and uncertain—all of it contained in the rotten order of the world.

beyond human power and freedom, there remains something very important, a kind of dark ground with the sticky consistency of cake batter onto which all words and ideas fall as though into tar, losing their shape and their meaning.

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

That the crumbs of human knowledge start to come together like chain links, one linking with the next, unbreakably. Soon it will be possible to cure every disease, including ones like this. But right now he feels helpless, he doesn’t understand her ailment, he doesn’t know what is behind it, and the only thing he can give this poor, thin, unfortunate girl is his own warm presence.

Perhaps Mrs. Rudnitzky would be relieved by prophecy, by the agile navigation of the darkness of her reason, of its shadows and fogs. Perhaps that is also a good place to live.

And yet, whenever anyone comes to her seeking advice, she’ll still unfold her board; when she unfolds it on the table and digs out from a small wooden box the appropriate figures, her eyelids start to tremble and her gaze drifts up until her pupils finally disappear.

The figures set out on the flat surface create all sorts of different arrangements, some pleasant, others ugly, some that set your teeth on edge. Hayah-Marianna is able to lay out in her board every “farther” and every “closer,” both in time and in space, knows how to show, based on a figure’s position, attraction or its opposite, repulsion. She also sees clearly conflict and accord.

Certain patterns develop out of this, patterns that connect with one another via bridges or gangways, there are also dikes and dams between them, and wedges and nails, joints, bands that squeeze together situations with similarly shaped outlines, like the staves on a barrel. There are also the sequences that look like ants’ paths, old botanical routes, and it isn’t known who’s walked down them or why they went that way instead of another. There are loops and vortices and dangerous spirals, and their slow movement draws Hayah’s gaze down, into the depths that accompany every thing.

Franciszek Wołowski the younger would like to have Eva. Not because he loves her and desires her, but because she is unavailable. The more impossible it becomes, the more Franciszek’s will to marry Eva Frank is fortified. This is why he has come down with such a serious case of her,

His proposal is passed over in silence, as if Franciszek had committed a shameful act that can never be mentioned by anyone.

He cried discreetly: his eyes grew moist, but he managed to hold back the tears, which flowed inwardly instead and washed his heart.

He had learned after the concert, which he had barely been able to afford, that there was something in this world that could raise a person to the height of happiness, and that it was possible not to even know about it, living in constant lack.

The emperor walks in. He is wearing light summer clothing, not French at all, rather peasant-like. His shirt, unbuttoned toward the top, reveals his slender neck and emphasizes the protruding lower jaw that is typical of the Habsburgs.

“You are overestimating my influence on the emperor. We are for pleasant, frivolous things.” A silence falls; it is hostile and unpleasant. Eva feels drenched.

Eva avoids going into town, she is ashamed, for in every place she owes somebody something.

if I had been born when you were, then perhaps I would be attempting to be just like you. But now other laws prevail. What you say, I would like to do. You keep waiting for mystical signs, for some sort of confederacy of the bałakaben, while it seems to me that man can be liberated much more simply and not in mystical spheres, but here, on earth.”

You say: The law must be broken in secret, in our bedchambers, while we pretend externally that we have followed it. Breaking the law in bedrooms and boudoirs!” Thomas senses he has gone too far in the direction of criticizing his uncle, and his tone of voice softens a bit. “I say that it’s the other way around: the law, if it is unjust and if it brings people misfortune, needs to be changed, we must act in the open, boldly, making no compromises.”

Is not death merely appearance, like the many phenomena that appear in the world and in which we believe, like so many children?

“Why have you not married?” I would ask him every time, unable to understand that he preferred to live on his own, having strangers do his washing, taking strangers to bed. Even if you don’t care much for women, still it is useful to live with one.

“I have no peace of mind, Nahman,” he said, leaning on his glass. “I have no peace in my soul.”

What is man? A spark. What is human life? A moment. What is the future now? A spark. And what the crazed course of time? A moment. Where does man come from? A spark. And what is death? A moment. Who was He while he contained the world? A spark. And what will he be once he swallows up the world again? A moment.

What day was it when his story reached its highest point, its noon, and from that time on—though he did not know about it—began to progress toward setting? It is a very interesting problem, for if people knew which day was the midpoint of their lives, perhaps they would be able to imbue their lives and the events taking place within them with some kind of meaning.

He determined to write an homage to Warsaw’s whores, whose customs he had been investigating over the last few years, as a scholar investigates the lives of the savages on distant islands.

his manhood does not share his enthusiasm for women in flimsy shirts that barely cover their bottoms—in half-asses, as the men say jokingly, maliciously of them.

And that’s another thing—women attract him, but they also disgust him more and more.

His buddies seem to take the same pleasure from this doddering misogyny as he does, and afterward they have all kinds of discussions about their girls, entertaining themselves

After a long journey, he made it to Petersburg and realized that he could keep living just like this—being always in motion, in a cart, on a horse, every day with different people. He was pleasant, intelligent, conversant.

Sophie von La Roche, who is a writer and whose custom it is to write, is careful to note down in her diary everything she sees:

The human mind cannot tolerate uncertainty or things left mostly unsaid, and so right away every possible history began to be invented regarding these insect-like people.

She can just sit like this on the balcony, looking out over the water, which she experiences as a kind of tender caress, the fluid motion, the movement of the sails, all of it in some way touches her body and leaves a pleasant streak along her skin.

The cold here is different, foreign—it clings to the skin, keeps hands and feet in a state of constant numbness; it is hard to make a needle go into an embroidery hoop, hard to turn the pages of a book.