One of the most valuable things I’ve learnt in the Camino is that you don’t shy away from the storm, you walk Right Into It.
The idea is not to wait on a sunshine that may take its time to come, nor to take a detour to avoid the storm altogether.
The idea is to keep on walking, facing whatever comes in the path you have chosen for yourself.
Let’s not be naive either. Navigating through a storm it’s not a pleasant walking experience. It takes resilience. It takes courage. It takes determination. Above all, one must be prepared. Or else, the venture could be fatal.
Measuring the risks and making sure you have everything you need to minimise them—from material to physical and mental tool—is crucial to come out through the other side unscathed (or almost).
A storm is a dangerous, whimsical, life-threatening phenomenon that must be approached in full awareness, its destructive power not underestimated. But it’s also incredibly beautiful.
When you come into it willingly, prepared, you get to enjoy this unparalleled force of Nature. You stand in awe at its magnificence. You look at it with renewed respect and calmness. You quit being afraid.
The same philosophy needs to be applied to every situation in life. Every fear you host and every battle you are faced with. It’s important not to turn away from them, but to keep on walking straight, always, ready to confront them when the time comes.
There’s a lot to be learnt and enjoyed once you have done so.
“But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the green in a warehouse?”
This is a story to be read over and over again. For Tokarczuk has managed to create a captivating, heart-warming thriller of mysterious murders which is, at the same time, filled with all the essential questions of our existence. At the centre of it, the right to live, and which criteria determine whose right this is, is examined.
As conductor of her story, our eyes and ears, Tokarczuk has conceived a character conferred with all the virtues societies tend to rank lowest in value: a ridden-with-sickness, eccentric, solitary middle-aged woman. She, and only she, will have the key to solve the wave of murderings taking place, but rarely will she be heard or even taken into consideration. After all, what could an old person know about such important matters, least if she is a woman? Least if she is talking about a righteous animal rebellion that would be the cause behind the incidents?
Indeed, animals and our relationship with them are at the core of the tale, its lines sprinkled with such a fierce defence of animal rights and a vindication for the safeguarding and respect of Nature that it can be easily placed within the ecofeminist philosophy. In the world vision of our protagonist, through her actions and beliefs, there stands an overarching, yet radical idea that human beings are nothing but another element in a complex ecosystem, too big for us to fully grasp, let alone control. And why should we even have the right to control it? she constantly questions the many men that wander through the story determined to ignore all of her warnings. Why do we believe ourselves entitled to stand above the other beings and dispose of their lives at will? Here the issue of usefulness emerges strongly. Usefulness as a man-made concept applied precisely to legitimise destruction of the natural world by human hands: only what is considered useful to our species is allowed to live.
Our charming old lady perfectly ticks the “useless” box if we are to accept the tacit social norm about what’s useful and what’s not. She is nothing but a nuisance for the police officers in charge of the investigation, her neighbours, the members of the hunting club, the Catholic priest and even the school’s headmaster, who deems her alternative teaching methods (consisting in treating children as intelligent and capable beings) inappropriate. Probably the mind with more clarity of all, she is nevertheless set aside and labelled with the unoriginal and completely stereotyped title of “crazy old lady”.
Countless are the women, in literature as well as in real life, who have been credited with such a title. Rarely do we see one as a main character in a positive light. A Nobel prize winner, Tokarczuk knew perfectly well that only a female voice could encompass the compassion, the agony and the rightful rage of the powerless, all at once. Only a woman’s body could freely transit in between the human world and the natural world with the certitude of being part of both. And an old body nonetheless. One gifted with the frailty of time and the patience of experience that surprises the sceptic reader with its tireless energy and countless capacities.
Ultimately, by entering this carefully constructed universe set in rural Poland amid a hostile season, we get to reconcile ourselves with the very concept of uselessness. In a society ruled by violence, vanity and power, it’s the small and humble spirits that survive. Could it be that the useless, the discarded, have something to teach us? In the bonds formed between our pani Duszejko and her loyal friends —human and non-human alike— we find that it’s in the mutual care and reliance on each other where their strength lies and their happiness is nurtured.
Maybe we have been looking at it wrongly for a long time, and the values that we have admired as useful, those coincidentally embodied in the victims of our novel, are only setting the course for annihilation of our species and this beautiful home we share with so many others. Our crazy old lady is reminding us that every form of life is precious in itself, and no artificially-established human criteria should make us forget that.
Woman in the making 