| You think you’re going to experience something, and you may even actually experience it, but then suddenly you realize that you didn’t experience anything, and it doesn’t bother you at all. It doesn’t bother you that you can’t remember anything about what you didn’t experience and what you experienced. It doesn’t (...)
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| | Down Garwolińska to the end, then hang a right onto Makowska along the railroad tracks toward Olszynka. Sometimes all the way to the roundhouse. The street looked like a village road; on hot days it would be lined with guys sitting and drinking. Branches of fruit trees reached over the fences. (...)
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Olga TokarczukDay House and Night House
About the book
The Dream
The first night, I had an immobile dream. I dreamed that I was pure looking, pure vision, and that I had neither a body nor a name. I am suspended high above the valley at some undefined point from which I can see everything, or almost everything. I move by looking, but I stay in place. It is rather the visible world that responds to me when I look at it. It moves nearer and closer so that I can see everything at once or only the most particular details.
So I can see the valley with a house standing in it, in the very middle of it, but it is not my house or my valley. Nothing belongs to me. I do not even belong to myself, and nothing like me even exists. I can see the circular line of the horizon that surrounds the valley on all sides. I can see an agitated, turgid brook flowing between the hills. I can see trees grown into the earth with powerful legs, like one-legged, motionless animals. This immobility that I am seeing is apparent. If I only want to, I can penetrate beyond appearances. Then I see moving streams of water and sap beneath the bark of the tree, circulating and recirculating, up and down. Under the roof of the house, I can see the bodies of sleeping people. Their motionlessness, too, is apparent -hearts are beating delicately inside them, and the blood is flowing. Not even their dreams are real, because this is something else that I can see: what those dreams are - pulsating fragments of images. None of these sleeping bodies is any closer to me or farther from me than any other. I am simply looking at them, and in their baffling sleeping thoughts, I see my self. That is when I discover a strange truth. Looking, without reflection, without any judgements, without feeling, is what I am. And I immediately discover something else: I can also look through time, as if I were a cursor on a computer screen that moves by itself, or that simply does not know anything about the existence of the hand that makes it move.
I dream this way, it seems, for an infinitely long time. There is no before or after, nor do I expect anything new, for there is nothing that I can acquire or lose. The night will never end. Nothing happens. Not even time changes what I see. I look without seeing anything new, or forgetting anything that I have seen.
Translated by William Brand
Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962) - is the most popular and most highly regarded novelist of the younger generation.
Polish edition by Wydawnictwo RUTA
Olga Tokarczuk Dom dzienny, dom nocnyc/o Wydawnictwo Ruta
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There are more than 31,000 publishers registered in Poland. However, the market is highly concentrated. The 300 largest publishing firms still hold almost 98 per cent of it. More »
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