The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

He examines the seal and his own name calligraphed in beautiful, self-assured penmanship, the flourishes fluttering over the paper like battle flags.

Now I enjoy the special circumstance of knowing the Author personally, and it even happens that I can hear his voice—as if you were here to read it aloud to me—but it is also the case that the book possesses a strange magic: it can be read without pause, here, there, and something interesting always remains in one’s mind, giving one fantastic pretexts for thinking of how very great and complex this world is,

“The world is quite a perilous pilgrimage for those who sigh after eternity,” which would show the bishop’s uncomfortable and exhausting situation

He’s had a couple of very bright nights on account of a full moon that shone, seemingly pleased with itself.

And then that horrific pain that governs the body and rules the mind; pain, the emperor of this world.

Of how the world was born of God’s exhaustion Every now and then, God wearies of his own luminous silence, and infinity starts to make him a little bit sick.

scrunches up inside itself, leaving just enough space for the emergence—at once and out of nowhere—of a world.

The animals go slowly, heads bowed, exhausted from long days of journeying, as if in a trance.

Only the donkeys raise a ruckus, shattering the dawn with their squall of suffering and unbearable confusion, waking people up.

Like clock hands that have freed themselves from faces, independently now they mark a stray, chaotic time no clockmaker will ever be able to quell. Their shadows, long and sharp, jab the desert, vex the falling night.

Nahman, who sees signs wherever he looks, wonders what kind of future is portended by these lowly bodies, what fortune they are trying to tell. And as the desert is the only place on earth where time spins around, loops back then leaps ahead like some fat locust, select pairs of eyes might be able to get a glimpse into the future here.

It’s like an itch that goes away only when he begins to scratch out the chaos of his thoughts into sentences.

Nahman has always had the sense that he’s a part of something bigger, something unprecedented and unique. That not only has nothing like this ever happened before, but also that it never will—never can—again. And that he is the one who must write it all down for all those who’ve not been born yet, because they’re going to want to know.

What do we want some sage for?

a few he embellishes a bit, but of course that’s not a sin—rather a service, as they’ll be easier to remember this way.

There is always a hand behind the letters, always a face that emerges from the sentences on the page. After all, even reading the Torah, one immediately feels some other presence, a great presence whose true name cannot be contained in any—even

the Torah and the world entire are composed of God’s names. Every word is his name, every thing. The Torah is woven from God’s names like a fabric,

The sage Kabbalist Rabbi Eleazar realized long ago that parts of the Torah had been given to us out of order. For if they had been in their proper order, everyone would have instantly become immortal, would have been able to revive the dead, work miracles. Which was why—to maintain the order of this world—the pieces had been put in disarray.

tikkun, the repair of the world, mending the holes in its fabric so filled with overlapping patterns, squiggles, tangles, trails. This is how to view this strange pursuit of Nahman’s. Some people heal others, some build homes, others study books and rearrange the words in them to find the proper meaning. Nahman writes.

I know I am no prophet, and I know there is no Holy Spirit in me. I hold no sway over voices, nor can I see into the future.

I count quickly and have a gift for languages. I am a born messenger.

some force deep down inside me was unable to complete a phrase or sentence started and instead had to repeat it several times, hurriedly, rendering it almost into gibberish.

learned how to go outside myself, in a sense, and take myself by the throat, so as to restrain the rattle that would otherwise be found there. I finally managed to break down the words into syllables, to water them down like soup,

They are all hungry. They will wait to pray for real until they get home.

On the one hand, it was a source of great delight to me that somewhere up there, where the plans for the world were drawn up day by day, there was a strictly enforced system of justice.

in an instant the air will be filled with Muslim prayer, which is supposed to be a hymn and an encomium, but which sounds more like complaint.

If the sky is a mirror that reflects time, then an image of burning homes is ever o’erhanging Busk.

whenever the spring thaws came, mud would creep onto the roads and cut off the town from the rest of the world, and the town’s inhabitants, like all inhabitants of swamps and peat bogs, would simply sit in their damp shacks, gloomy, stagnant, almost as if they’d been covered in mold.

For the most part people lived in squalor, miserable and superstitious, wishful for some salvation to come.

There is a stork on Busk’s coat of arms, standing on one leg. So did we, the people of Busk, always stand on one leg, ready to set forth into the world, yet tethered to a lifelong lease, a single tenancy.

We had the right to leave, officially, yet that right was unstable, murky as the dirty water.

We believed with a pure heart and very deeply

“Why, if God so cherishes us, is there so much suffering in the world?

If He cherishes us so, then why are we not healthy, why are we not preserved from hunger, and not only us—why not others, as well, so that we don’t have to gaze upon illness and death?”

from childhood on, I, too, absorbed this eternal grudge against creation. Something is not right; there is some untruth afoot. Something must have been left out from what we learned in our yeshivas. Certain facts have been concealed from us, no doubt, and this is why we cannot assemble the world as we know it into a single whole. There has to be a secret somewhere to explain it all.

when I turned sixteen that I realized I wanted to be in the service of some good cause and that I was also the kind of person who would never be satisfied with what was, always wanting what was not yet.

Leybko, as he was called, had just been married, though he could scarcely even grow a mustache, and he was so terrified of his own marriage that he convinced his wife and parents-in-law that before he began to earn a living, he needed first to commune with true holiness and have his fill of it, so that it might keep him through the years to come.

On the other hand, we read voraciously, without pause, which left our eyes always bloodshot—this was how people came to recognize us.

Since God is everything in everything, then how could there be things other than God? And how could God have created the world out of nothing?

He carried his holiness like so much heavy luggage.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “the whole world is God.” Everyone wholeheartedly seconded this enthusiastic response. “And evil?” asked the Kabbalist, tricky and malicious. “Evil, too, is God,” calmly retorted the Besht,

In such instances, I was never able to shake the impression that ultimately, and irrefutably, God must not give a damn about us.

“The secret of evil is the only one God doesn’t ask us to take on faith, but rather has us consider.”

God might have said to himself: I cannot have a person who is simultaneously free and fully subject to me. I cannot have a creature free from sin who would be at the same time a person. Better sinful humanity than a world without men.

I had the impression that I was developing a new sense, the existence of which had stayed a secret to me until now.

Some people have a sense of unearthly things, just as others have an excellent sense of smell or hearing or taste. They can feel the subtle shifts in the great and complicated body of the world. And some of these have so honed that inner sight that they can even tell where a holy spark has fallen, notice its glow in the very place you would least expect it.

just as a man born blind knows not what light might be, or a deaf man music, or a man without a sense of smell the plenitude of flowers, so, too, can those without the sixth sense be merely bewildered by mystical souls, take them for madmen, for fanatics, for people who make up such things for reasons unknown.

As soon as that young man uttered those terrible words, everyone covered their ears with their hands and closed their eyes, so as not to give their senses access to such sacrilege.

A person’s mind needs sanctity, so it seeks it everywhere, like a plant shoot growing in a cave that rises toward any, even the slightest, light. That was a good explanation.

Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw from Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space.