The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

This world is terrible, it is true, but perhaps it can be spruced up a little here and there.

There is nothing that brings greater relief than the certainty that there is someone who really knows. For we ordinary people never have such certainty.

So it is: our parents remind us of what we like least about ourselves, and in their growing old we see our many sins, I thought, but perhaps this was something more—sometimes it happens that the souls of parents and children are fundamentally hostile to one another, and they meet in life in order to remedy this hostility. But it doesn’t always work.

Before the fat man gets skinny, the skinny man will croak, as the saying goes around these parts.

the Lord God wants to punish us by means of creation itself: us, His creations, who sin with creation. He washes His hands of it, however, in order to preserve His goodness in our eyes. He looks for natural means to destroy us indirectly, by way of some natural cause, so that the blow is lighter than it would be if He Himself struck it, since such a thing we could not understand.

Suddenly it seems to him that aside from all those lofty theses printed by the Berlinische Monatsschrift, beyond light and reason, 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. The lofty tirades from the newspaper sound as if they had been spoken by a ventriloquist—indistinct and grotesque. From everywhere comes something like a chuckle; perhaps at one time Asher might have thought that it was the devil, but nowadays he doesn’t believe in such things. He remembers what Gitla said—a shadow, something well-lit casts a shadow. That is what is disturbing about this new idea. Enlightenment begins when people lose their faith in the goodness and the order of the world. The Enlightenment is an expression of mistrust.