The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that our daily interactions and consumption of information shape our reality.
Olga Tokarczuk emphasizes that our understanding of the world is crafted through the myriad of information and interactions we engage with daily. Each element, whether it's a film, book, or casual conversation, contributes to the 'fabric' of our lives, illustrating how interconnected knowledge and experiences are in forming our perspectives and realities.
In practice
In a presentation about the impact of media on culture, this quote can underscore the importance of our daily sources of information.
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.
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.
How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.
Regard as free not those whose status makes them outwardly free, but those who are free in their character and conduct. For we should not call men truly free when they are wicked and dissolute, since they are slaves to worldly passions. Freedom and happiness of soul consist in genuine purity and detachment from transitory things.
I have no doubt that the nation has suffered more from undue secrecy than from undue disclosure. The government takes good care of itself.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
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