The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

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.

Women wash their hair and dry it in the August sun outside, clean their homes, adorning them with flowers, sweeping the floors so that the Messiah may arrive to a neat and tidy world. This world is terrible, it is true, but perhaps it can be spruced up a little here and there.

Moliwda always reflects on his childhood when he finds himself at sea – he doesn’t know why. Evidently the water’s limitlessness makes him feel a little dizzy; he has to grasp at something.

You will say: ‘imprecise, idle chatter’. And no doubt you’ll be right. Maybe the whole art of writing, my dear friend, is the perfection of imprecise forms…

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.

For is it not so that our stories are told to us by others? We can know ourselves to the extent that others tell us who we are and what it is we’re struggling to do. What would I remember of my childhood, were it not for my mother? How would I have known myself had I not seen myself reflected in Jacob’s eyes?