little bits of drive your plow
about a book i loved to shreds
Hello dear reader,
Good morning, I am wishing you an energetic and lovely start to your Sunday. I love mornings, bright sunny ones as much as cloudy and chilly ones. I wake up and the first thing I do is smile to my mumma if she’s around, otherwise I smile to myself, to greet another day. I usually make my bed and then go to my room to do some early morning reading. I make myself a glass of milk and sit with my current read to bask in solitude and to travel to worlds unknown. I’ve slowly come to like my routine here at home, even though I don’t get to go out a lot, which is honestly a relief, but I remember feeling very unsettled when I would go even three days without going outside in the fresh evening air.
I finished reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones if the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk recently. It is such a splendid book, I was incapable of to putting it down. Even when I did manage to put it down, the world inside the book kept playing inside my head. Every time I put it down I could not help but appreciate how masterfully it was written. I am sold anytime a book has existentialist philosophy and metaphysical elements and that, along with the mystery in the writing, the ominous, threatening, otherworldly innuendos, just did it for me. I’ve become even more absent minded than usual because of it. You ever get the feeling when you’ve finished reading a book or finished watching a movie and you don’t think too much about it while you're reading it or watching it and it is only a few days later that it hits you that you’ve consumed a magnificent piece of work and it has radically changed you as a person? That happens with me a lot, it takes a lot of time for me to let things seep in. Whether it is brilliantly written books, or death, or even normal everyday things. I’m sure it makes me come off as a dim-witted person but that’s just how I am. I need time to process things.
I thought, in this issue of the newsletter, I will share with you some of the sentences that stuck with me, that left me gasping. I do hope they seem thought provoking to you like they did to me and that you take something away from this newsletter, otherwise, what is it even good for?
“What a joy it is in life when you happen to have a clean, warm kitchen.”
“They really were the people from the well - they’d fallen into it long ago and had arranged their lives at the bottom of it, thinking the well was the entire world.”
“The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we don’t know how to live without it.”
“Oddball was probably made for a life of solitude, just as I was, but there was no way for our separate solitudes to be united.”
“There are more than enough traits and Characteristics in this world for each of us to be richly endowed.”
“The whole complex human psyche is has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing. To stop the truth from reaching him by wrapping it in illusion, in idle chatter. The world is a prison full of suffering, so constructed that to suffer, one must inflict pain on others.”
“Its strange how the Night erases all colors, as if it didn’t give a damn about such worldly extravagance.”
“The human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching site of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system, it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight if this knowledge. Because every particle of this world is made of suffering.”
When I was talking about taking something away from this newsletter, I certainly didn’t mean existential dread, but it seems this book is full of it. Also, I started learning about astrology all because of this book and now I have a separate notebook for it, hehe. It is a lot of fun. Anyway, this issue is just me asking you to READ DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD BY OLGA TOKARCZUK BECAUSE IT DIDN’T WIN OLGA THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NOTHING. Okay bye, love you, have a beautiful day, you precious ass person. Enjoy this cute ass, goofy ass picture of me now. (I am in a beautiful mood right now, as is evident, definitely going to regret being this silly later.)
Some Sunday music as a thank you for supporting me and my newsletter because you don’t know how much it means to me, your support.
kbye.
sending you all the coolness in the world,
Aashvi
Love the vibes! :)