But sometimes I fear that the people of my country can unite only beside victims' bodies, over coffins and in cemeteries. Like tribesmen who dance around old totems, we ignore the living and can only appreciate the dead.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the lamentable tendency of a society to unite only in times of mourning rather than appreciating the living.
Olga Tokarczuk's quote speaks to a somber reality where communities bond and find common ground only in the face of tragedy, mourning the dead rather than celebrating the living. It highlights a profound disconnect between individuals in life, suggesting that collective identity may be rooted more in loss than in the shared experience of existence, prompting reflection on how societies value the dead over the living and the importance of cherishing those still with us.
In practice
In a speech about community resilience during a memorial service.
But the fact is we did have colonies in the east of Poland, we did have a slave economy there. But this is not common knowledge - or part of our national myth. It goes against the current romanticised view of the government, and much of the country, that Poles have always been victims, never oppressors.
My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.
I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective center of the world.
The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.
I first read Sigmund Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' as a young girl, and it helped me to understand that there are thousands of possible ways to interpret our experience, that everything has a meaning, and that interpretation is the key to reality. This was the first step to becoming a writer.
Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
If you look at other countries, you see they have different values: defend more, pass the ball out more, winning is holy. In England, you could say that sport itself is holy. They say, 'Look, guys, it's about more than just winning.'
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
The market economy is deeply congruent with the values set out in the Hebrew Bible. Material prosperity is a divine blessing. Poverty crushes the spirit as well as the body, and its alleviation is a sacred task. Work is a noble calling.
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