The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

Asher Rubin thinks that most people are truly idiots, and that it is human stupidity that is ultimately responsible for introducing sadness into the world. It isn’t a sin or a trait with which human beings are born, but a false view of the world, a mistaken evaluation of what is seen by our eyes. Which is why people perceive every thing in isolation, each object separate from the rest. Real wisdom lies in linking everything together—that’s when the true shape of all of it emerges.

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.

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. Nahman writes.

my mother whispered into my ear: “My little fool, in the world to come, the duksel will stoke the pezure for us,” meaning that in the next life the princess would add fuel to our stoves.

Did she know about this? Had someone told her? Did they explain to people in their church that this was how things were going to be? That everything would be reversed, and the servants would become the lords, and the lords the servants? But would this in fact be just and good?

And so, 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.

All this that surrounded us—how to account for it? Under what rubric were we to place hunger and bodily injury, and the slaughter of animals, and children felled by the plague and laid row upon row in the earth? In such instances, I was never able to shake the impression that ultimately, and irrefutably, God must not give a damn about us.

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.

My soul will not let itself be locked in any prison, iron cage or cage made out of air. My soul wants to be like a ship in the sky, and the body’s boundaries cannot hold it back. And no walls will ever imprison it: not those that have been built by human hands, nor the walls of politeness, nor the walls of civility or good manners. It will not be entrapped by pompous speeches, by kingdoms’ borders, good breeding—anything. My soul flies over all of that with the greatest ease, it is above what is contained in words, and beyond what cannot even be contained in words. It is beyond pleasure and beyond fear. It exceeds what is lovely and lofty just as it does what is terrible and vile.

A young person has many freedoms here. He has the right and the obligation to ask questions; there are no stupid questions, and each must be considered properly.

Nahman sits many times by himself at night on the edge of the trash heap and looks at the starry sky. 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.

How did it happen that some have to pay while others collect? Where did it come from that certain people have such an amount of land they can’t even traverse it all, while others have only a little plot, paying so much in rent they can’t even afford a loaf of bread?

“Seems to me land oughtn’t to be sold or purchased. Just like water and air. Nor do people deal in fire. Those are things given to us by God, not to each of us individually, but to all of us together. Like the sky and the sun. Does the sun belong to anyone? Do the stars?”

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.

He considers that the farther south he goes, the weaker Christianity becomes, the stronger the sun, the sweeter the wine, the more Fatum there is—and the better his life gets. His decisions are not decisions, arriving instead from outside, having their proper place in the order of the world. And since it is this way, there is less responsibility, and therefore less of that internal shame, that unbearable feeling of guilt for everything he has done.

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.