The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

If people could read the same books, they would inhabit the same world. Now they live in different worlds, like the Chinese described by Kircher. And then there are those—and their numbers are vast—who cannot read at all, whose minds are dormant, thoughts simple, animal, like the peasants with their empty eyes. If he, the priest, were king, he would decree that there be one day each week reserved for the peasants to read; by urging all peasants to engage with literature, he could instantly change the Commonwealth. Perhaps it also has to do with the alphabet—that there isn’t only one, that there are lots of them; each produces its own type of thinking. Like bricks: some, fired and smooth, yield cathedrals, while others, of rough clay, become the peasants’ shacks.

People who write books, he thinks, don’t want to have their own stories.

And he pictures his own image: small in stature, ordinary. Always on the road. He documents himself. He calls those notes “scraps,” for they are what remains after other, more important work. Crumbs—such is the stuff of life. His writing on the lid of the case set up on his lap, in the dust and discomfort of travel, is in essence 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.

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.

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.

One winter night, however, I could not fall asleep and suddenly felt very strange. I had the overwhelming impression that everything around me was false, that it was artificial, as if the world had been painted by some skilled artist on canvases hung up all around. Or, to put it another way: as if everything around me had been made up, and by some miracle had taken the shape of reality.

There are few who do not know that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, but that since she didn’t want to be obedient to Adam, or to lie beneath him as God decreed, she fled to the Red Sea. There she turned red as though flayed. God sent three fearsome angels after her, Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, to drag her back by force. They accosted her in her hiding place, tormented her, and threatened to drown her. But she didn’t want to go back. Even if she had wanted to, she would no longer have been able; Adam would have been forbidden to accept her, for according to the Torah, a woman who has lain with another must not resume relations with her husband. And who was Lilith’s lover? Samael himself.

“Between the heart and the tongue lies an abyss,” he said. “Remember that. Thoughts must be concealed, particularly since you were born, to your great misfortune, a woman. Think so that they think you are not thinking. Behave in such a way that you mislead others. We all must do this, but women more so. Talmudists know about the strength of women, but they fear it, which is why they pierce girls’ ears, to weaken them. But we don’t. We don’t do that because we ourselves are like women. We survive by hiding. We play the fools, pretend to be people we are not. We come home, and then we take off our masks. But we bear the burden of silence: masa duma.” And now, as Yente lies covered up to her neck in a Korolówka woodshed, she knows she has deceived them all.

In the end they speak a mixture, not worrying about the provenance of words; words are not nobility that want their genealogical trees retraced. Words are merchants, swift and useful, now here, now there.

He said that there are four types of readers. There is the reading sponge, the reading funnel, the reading colander, and the reading sieve. The sponge absorbs everything it comes into contact with; and it is evident he remembers much of it later, too. But he is not able to filter out what is most important. The funnel takes in what he reads at one end, while at the other, everything he’s read pours out of him. The strainer lets through the wine and keeps the sediment; he ought not to read at all—it would be infinitely better if he simply dedicated himself to some manual trade. The sieve, on the other hand, separates out the chaff to give a result of only the finest grains.

He spoke as if he did not fully believe himself, as if he had in his possession several other versions, equally true.

To be foreign is to be free. To have a great expanse stretch out before you—the desert, the steppe. To have the shape of the moon behind you like a cradle, the deafening symphony of the cicadas, the air’s fragrance of melon peel, the rustle of the scarab beetle when, come evening, the sky turns red, and it ventures out onto the sand to hunt. To have your own history, not for everyone, just your own history written in the tracks you leave behind. To feel like a guest everywhere you go, occupying homes just for a while, not bothering about the garden, enjoying the wine without forming any attachment to the vineyard. Not to understand the language, and therefore to register gestures and faces better, the expressions in people’s eyes, the emotions that appear on faces like the shadows of clouds. To learn a foreign language from scratch, a little bit in every place, comparing words and finding orders of similarity. This state of foreignness must be carefully guarded, for it gives enormous power.