![]() ![]() ![]() Tokarczuk recounts a moment from her early childhood that deeply moved her: Her mother, inverting Montaigne’s notion that “to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,” told her small daughter that she missed her even before she was born - an astonishing gesture of love so total that it bends the arrow of time. That is what the Polish psychologist turned poet and novelist Olga Tokarczuk explores in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. ![]() Like all narratives, the strength of our tenderness reflects the strength and sensitivity of our storytelling. Like all orientations of the spirit, tenderness is a story we tell ourselves - about each other, about the world, about our place in it and our power in it. When we do save each other, it is always with some version of the mightiest lifeline we humans are capable of weaving: tenderness - the best adaptation we have to our existential inheritance as “the fragile species.” But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.” “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James Baldwin observed as he offered his lifeline for the hour of despair. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |