The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

When given a thing to sharpen, he sets up a primitive wooden rack that several leather straps make into a simple machine, the wheel of which, set in motion by his hand, hones the metal blade. Sometimes sparks fly and then careen into the mud, which provides particular pleasure to the filthy, mangy children around here. From his profession, this man will earn groszy: a pittance. Someday, this wheel may help him drown himself—an occupational advantage of sorts.

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.

His mother, seeing little Benedykt’s love of books, sent him to the Jesuits of Lwów at the age of fifteen. That decision considerably improved his relationship with his stepfather, who never cared for him. From then on, they almost never saw each other.

The first thing every neophyte must understand is that God, whatever he is, has nothing in common with humankind, and that he remains so far away as to be completely inaccessible to the human senses. The same is true of his intentions. At no point will people ever learn what he is up to.

In her scattered state, it seems to her she won’t be able to return to the hardwood floor of this world. So be it. It’s better here—times intermingle, overlap. How could she ever have believed in the flow of time? She had thought time flowed! Now she finds it funny. It’s obvious that time spins around like skirts whirling in a dance. Like a linden top twirled onto a table and sustained in motion there by the reverential eyes of children.

For some time they seek a common language. Jacob starts with what the Jews of Smyrna speak, Ladino, and Nahman, not understanding, responds in Hebrew. Neither of them feels right chatting in the street in the holy language, so they break off, and Nahman switches to Yiddish. But here again Jacob has a rather strange accent, so instead he responds in Turkish, fluently, joyfully, as though finding himself suddenly on home turf, though Nahman doesn’t feel completely at home here. 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.

I took to heart what Isohar had taught us. 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.

What is life, after all, if not dancing on graves?

the Messiah is, after all, the one on whom the world must wait forever. The one who arrives is a false Messiah. The Messiah is the one who never arrives. That’s the whole point.

Isn’t this the very glue that holds the human world together? Isn’t this why we need other people, to give us the pleasure of knowing we are better than they are? Amazingly, even those who seem to be the worst-off take, in their humiliation, a perverse satisfaction in the fact that no one has it worse than they do. Thus they have still, in some sense, won.

I often have the same dream, and Reb Mordke always said to pay attention to dreams that frequently repeat, for they are our link with infinity.

The comet resembles a scythe aimed at humanity, a naked glistening blade that might slice off millions of heads at any moment, and not only the ones on the craned necks in Ivanie, but also city dwellers’ heads, Lwów heads, Kraków heads—even royal heads. There is no doubt it is a sign of the end of the world, a harbinger of angels rolling up the whole show like a rug. The play is evidently over, armies of archangels already gathering on the horizon. If you pay attention, you can hear the clanking of the angelic arsenal. And it is a mark of the mission of Jacob, and of all who follow him on his arduous path. Any who yet doubt must now acknowledge that even the heavens are joining this onward march. As the days pass, it becomes clear to all in Ivanie that the comet is a hole drilled into the heavenly firmament, through which the divine light may pass in order to reach us, and through which God is now checking on the world.

For us, then, for people, good is something other than what it is for God. For us, good is the tension between God’s perfection and his withdrawal in order that the world might arise. For us, good is the absence of God from where he could instead be.

Several days later, we were on the road, and as it is written in the Shocher Tov, four things weaken a person: hunger, travel, fasting, and authorities.

I fear to complain of it or to cry, for a creature like myself has not the boldness to debate with the Creator where he sets his limits, and I stand like a tree stripped of its bark—without feeling. I ought to depart, and no one would suffer or despair over it.

You Yourself once told us in Ivanie about two kinds of people. Of some you said that they were filled with darkness, people who believe that the world as it is is evil and unjust, and that we must simply adapt to it and play that game, become the same as the world. And of the other sort, you said that they are the ones suffused with light, people who believe that the world is evil and terrible, but that it can always be changed. And that we ought not to assimilate to this world, but rather to be strangers in it and command it to surrender to us and get better.

He could have healed the blind man with His universal love, but instead He mixed saliva with mud and put it on his eyes. He could have healed everyone at once, but instead He made the pharmacy, the medic, medicinal herbs. His world is one great oddity.

“Everyone who seeks salvation must do three things: change his place of residence, change his name, and change his deeds.”

I thought that one would be a fool to expect people to remain as they once were, and that it is a kind of o’erpridefulness in us to treat ourselves as constant wholes, as if we were always the same person, for we are not.

“If a machine is capable of doing what man can do, and even doing it better than man, then what is man?”

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.

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

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.

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.