Olga Tocarczuk, the 2018 Nobel prize in literature winner, delivers here her Nobel lecture in Polish. But sorry, I had to read it in English, my Polish is quite alarming these days. Her talk opened the windows of my house, and I felt I was sitting outside in communication and communion with Nature. Olga recalls feeling an understanding of the connectedness of all things, humans, animals, and trees, and teapots when she was a child. This stroke me sincerely, especially having a daughter who feels empathy for her food and clothes and knowing where this comes from. She explains that she lost this sense of a bond between things and aims to rediscover it through her writing, with a tenderness that she describes as being the new form of love, something even beyond empathy. A must-read…several times.
“Reading is quite a complicated psychological and perceptual process. To put it simply: first the most elusive content is conceptualized and verbalized, transforming into signs and symbols, and then it is “decoded” back from language into experience. That requires a certain intellectual competence. And above all it demands attention and focus, abilities ever rarer in today’s extremely distracting world.”