Olga Tokarczuk : House of Day, House of Night
14.10.2002
[1-2] In their tangled dream-thoughts I could see myself (this was when I discovered the strange truth, that I was purely vision, without any values or emotions). Then I discovered that I could see through time as well, and that just as I could change my point of view in space, so I could change it in time, too. I was like the cursor on a computer screen navigating of its own accord, or at least oblivious of the hand that is moving it. --- I seemed to dream like this for an eternity. There was no before, or after, no sense of anticipation, because there was nothing to gain or lose. The night would never end. Nothing would happen. Even time would never change what I could see. I went on staring, not noticing anything new or forgetting anything I had seen.
[6] Marta is not a therapist at heart. She doesn't keep asking questions, she won't suddenly abandon the washing or sit down beside me and pat me on the back. She doesn't try, as others do, to work out the chronological order of important events by asking: ‘When did it start?’ - - - But in fact the most important thing is what's actually going on here and now, right before your eye, and questions about the beginning and end tell you nothing worth knowing.
[36] This was no reason not to believe in dreams, it finally occurred to her. They always make sense, they never get it wrong - it's the real world that doesn't live up to their perfection. Phone books tell lies, trains go in the wrong direction, the letters in the names of cities get mixed up, and people forget their own names. Only dreams are real. She thought she could hear that warm voice full of love in her left ear again.
[43] When you're travelling you have to take care of yourself in order to get by, you have to keep an eye on yourself and your place in the world. It means concentrating on yourself, thinking about yourself and looking after yourself. So when you're travelling all you really encounter is yourself, as if that were the whole point of it.
[100] I told Marta all this
while we were tying up the bundles of rhubarb. When we
had finished, Marta told me something like this: whenever people say ‘everything’,
‘always’, ‘never’, ‘every’, you should
watch out, because they're really only talking about themselves - in the
real world such generalities don't exist.
I shrugged.
[111-112] Marta has one habit that I find particularly annoying - she stands behind me and watches whatever I'm doing over my shoulder. I can hear her breathing: light, rapid and shallow - the breathing of and old person. And I'm aware of her smell; it's always the smell of bed-linen and sleeping bodies. Children sometimes smell like that. It's a smell that adults are eager to smother in perfumes and deodorants so that they smell like things, rather than people.
[112] Marta stops and stands over me, and whatever I'm doing, I start to do it wrong. If I'm reading, I lose the thread of the sentence. If I'm writing, I instantly stop having anything to say. I gently draw away from her, to avoid hurting her feelings, but I'm upset with her.
[125] But the whole time he never stopped thinking about the planet. What sort of a world is it if a new heavenly body can appear at any time? If you aren't aware of something, does that mean it doesn't exist? If a person becomes aware of something, does that knowledge change him? Can a planet change the world?
[125] But there was no one there, and he was a stranger even to himself; he looked at his hands but they were someone else's hands, someone he didn't know. He suffered in this dream, because he felt as if he had gone astray for ever, as if he were lost like a small child; he not only felt that he didn't know the way, but that the way itself simply didn't exist.
[134] And that is the nasty thing - not being able to identify something that you can smell, something that attracts your attention, while it's there. It's torture not being able to pinpoint the source, not being able to understand it, or interpret it. --- We have both guessed that it's the smell of death, and that R. first sensed it when his car hit the lorry, in that split second when anything could have happened and there was no going back. It was a moment of great potency, loaded with possibilities, like the gram of stuff that becomes an atom bomb. That's how it smells, and it's the smell of death.
[138] Marta said that you should not take what you see too seriously. --- I don't know why she told me this; she was supposed to be on her way out and was already holding the handle of the open door.
That evening I remembered her remark. Eyes are constructed to see nothing but still photographs from a living, moving film, and whatever they see pin down and kill. When I look at something, I believe that what I'm seeing is fixed, but that's a false image of the world. The world is constantly in motion, always vibrating. It has no zero point that can be committed to memory and understood. Our eyes take pictures that are nothing but images, mere outlines. The landscape is the greatest illusion of all, because there is nothing constant about it. You remember a landscape as if it were a picture. Your memory creates postcard images, but doesn't really comprehend the world at all. That's why landscape is so affected by the mood of the person looking at it. In it a person sees his own inner, transitory moments. Whatever he looks, he sees nothing but himself. That was what Marta wanted to tell me.
[221-222] They divide mushrooms into poisonous and edible, and the guidebooks discuss the features that allow you to tell the difference - as if there are good mushrooms and bad mushrooms. No mushroom book separates them into beautiful and ugly, fragnant and stinking, nice to touch and nasty, or those that induce sin and those that absolve it. People see what they want to see, and in the end they get what they want - clear, but false divisions. Meanwhile, in the world of mushrooms, nothing is certain.
[228] The person telling the story is always alive, in a way immortal - he's beyond the reach of time.
[248] Then I realized that it's not that I want to be old - it's not a particular age I'm longing for, but a certain way of life, one that's reserved for old age, perhaps. It involves not taking action, but if you do, doing it slowly, as if it's not the result of the action that matters, but the actual movement, the rhythm and melody of the movement. It means watching the ebb and flow of time, but no longer having the courage to go with the tide, or against it. It means ignoring time, and doing nothing, just counting the strokes of the living-room clock, the pit-a-pat of pigeons' feet on the window-sill, and the beats of your heart - and then immediately forgetting them all. It means not longing or thirsting for anything - at most, it might mean looking forward to a holiday; after all, that's what holidays are for. Being old means swallowing your spittle and feeling it slip down your throat, or touching the skin on your hand and feeling how icy smooth it has become. It means cuddling up to your own knees, or remembering something in the pedantic detail, from start to finish, until you nod off out of boredom.
[259-260] Speaking does harm, sows confusion and weakens things that are obvious. Speaking makes me tremble inside. I don't think I have ever said anything really important in my entire life - there's a lack of words for the most important things anyway.
[263] This sort of thing does happen to people, she told herself as she planted marigold seedlings in the borders. A person changes and outgrows old situations, like a child growing out of its clothes. Time goes by and changes everything. --- That's the way it is; I'm not doing anything wrong, she thought, I'm not hurting anyone - at worst, I'm only hurting myself, by waiting and waiting like this.
[265-266] She thought of Agni as solid. His physical determination astounded her. His body knew exactly what it wanted, it went straight to the point, as if passing right through her, but without doing her any harm. It was pleasant and good. His touch mesmerized her; she couldn't find words to express it. Her husband knew how to be more sensitive, to wait for her, look her in the eye and drink in the pleasure from her face. But Agni was self-absorbed, and that meant he was entirely real. He was slim, muscular and rugged. --- Her husband was herself; their touch ignited no spark, it produced neither heat nor frost. The only word that their similarity could engender was ‘no’.
[274] How does the world look when your life is filled with longing? It looks artificial, it crumbles and falls apart in your hands. Every single movement, every thought is watching itself, each emotion starts but never finishes, and finally even the object of your longing becomes artificial and unreal. Only the longing is real, imposing conditions on you - that you must be somewhere else, that you must have something you don't possess, or touch someone who doesn't exist.
[275] They were such very different people now that they might as well have changed their names - they could have filled in a form, saying: ‘We're no longer the people we used to be, so we're applying to change our personal details’ or something of the kind. What's the point of population censuses, if people keep changing and turning into someone else? Why does an adult bear the same first name as when he was a child? Why does a once loved woman still have her husband's surname when he's betrayed and abandoned her? Why do men go on bearing the same name when they come back from war, or why does a boy beaten by his father keep the same idiotic name when he starts to beat his own children?
[293] Lately R. has realized that right now, between the ages of thirty and forty, is the best time in life for seeing this sort of thing, so recently he bought a tripod from the Ukrainians at the market, and as soon as spring comes, he'll set up a camera on the east-facing terrace. He'll aim the lens up at the sky, above the crowns of the twin spruce trees, and leave it there until autumn. Each day he'll take one photograph, even when the sky is shrouded in uniform grey. R. is certain that in autumn we'll have a set of stills showing a rational sequence of skies, which is sure to mean something. It'll be possible to put all the pictures together like a jigsaw puzzle, or to load them one on top of another in the computer, or to make one single sky out of them with the help of a software programme. And then we'll know.
