# Flights By Olga Tokarczuk, 2007 ★★★★☆ First read in: August 2022 --- This book started with a very big bang. It kept making me go _Wow! Just.. wow!_ for some hundred or so pages into it but then got to be too much for me. Tiring and not orderly enough for my order-seeking tired mind.  It felt like a compendium of brilliant shower thoughts, you know the type that just explode with genius and clarity while you’re under the running water but then dissolve away in a puddle of confused commonality by the time you’ve finished drying your hair.  It's the opposite of the book I read before ([[The Driver's Seat]]) in the sense that this one should NOT be read in one or two goes in order to be properly enjoyed. On the contrary, it should be read with as many interruptions as possible. A calm, continuous time slot is wasted on Flights. It needs to be picked up at random, forgotten for no matter how long, then picked up again. And so on. -- It’s a “reimagined” novel, which means it's not a novel - as many people have noted. Should have maybe been a volume of essays, as the author herself admits. But it’s too poetic for a volume of essays, too blunt for a novel.  Reading it felt like flicking through tv channels back in the day or reading through a comments thread on social media. Some of the comments are long and sophisticated. Some are proper short stories, with great plot and clever endings. Some are factual notes. Some are anecdotes. Some are lines of beautiful poetry. It got tiresome to read after a while. I’m giving it 4 stars because it contains two of the most shocking paragraphs that I have ever read. I mean shocking in their accuracy describing my two most deeply personal, strongest and earliest felt dis-beliefs about this world: 1. that _I_ exist in it 2. that _it_ is hell This paragraph: Pg 1 "I'm a few years old. Darkness spreads softly from the sky, settling in everything like black dew. This evening is the limit of the world. I've clearly found myself in a trap now and I can't get out. I'd like to leave, but there's nowhere to go. And all of a sudden I know: ==there's nothing anyone can do now: here I am==." And this paragraph; Pg 18 "If it weren't for rationalisation, sublimation, denial - all the little tricks we let ourselves perform - ==if instead we simply saw the world as it was, with nothing to protect us, honestly and courageously, it would break our hearts.==" * Who was it that said that the best thing about reading is when you read something so private that you thought only you felt - and here all of a sudden you read it written down by a complete stranger, someone you’ve never met and never will. And they too thought the things you thought and felt the things you felt. And you feel less alone.  Who was it that said that we read to feel less alone? I have the feeling it was several people, in several ways that said it and I read it. It's true for me. I read to feel less alone. ## Other quotes Pg. 9  "I realised that - in spite of all the risks involved- a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest …" etc, check out the whole page and following Pg. 17  ".. that ninety percent is more significant than five." Pg. 22  "My set of symptoms revolves around my being drawn to all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken. I'm interested in whatever shape this may take, mistakes in the making of the thing, dead ends. (...) debunks any illusion of softness." Pg.24 =="conjoined twins calling into question the foundations of logic by asserting that 1 = 2" == This painful realisation I've had that the world is hell. So already, as willing biological parents, we're consciously bringing children into hell. And so it takes a special kind of evil then, to knowingly bring a _disabled_ child into hell. Isn't this world bad enough, I thought. Won't children anyway have to live life knowing that millions of simultaneous acts of unspeakable cruelty take place at any single moment in time, regardless whether they turn their attention to it or not? Do we need to force them to live knowing this.. while _disabled_? But another perspective is, maybe the disability occupies so much space that there's no room to accommodate this knowing and the hurt that comes with it. Maybe similarly to how the ethics of a society at any given time in history depend on its needs at that particular time (for example, a starving or dying population won't have privacy rights as their political priority), maybe so the ethics of an individual are fully dependent on their needs at that point in time. And yet another perspective is that any claim to pain and joy only makes sense in a particular frame of reference; in other words, pain and joy are relative, they are ours and ours alone, and can never be evaluated by outsiders. This means that not only can we not evaluate someone else's joy or suffering, but we can not even evaluate _our own_ if it's not the present state. We can only speak to what *we* feel, not to what anyone else does, and we can only speak to what we feel *right now*, not at any other moment in time, past or future. The language-squishing hypothesis and the experience-stretching hypothesis explain this well, they're mentioned in the funniest popular science books I've ever read and one of my favourite books of all time [[Stumbling on Happiness]]. Another perspective yet, is [Ponyo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponyo). Pg 25 "... forming words that I would soon pronounce for them." Pg 25 LOL "... now in such a beautiful resting place, spacious and dry, well-lit (..) they must be the envy of those bones that got stuck in eternal wrestling matches with the earth."  Pg 27 Check out this entire fragment on this page, from _"The heart (...) Please note that that is, in fact, the colour of our bodies: greyish brown, ugly."_ up until _"when the heart pumps out blood as it's supposed to, blood looks just like snot."_ Pg 62 - on airports Pg 103 "_Purging the map"_ - I wish I could adapt this whole section for screen, turn it into a video. Very poetic. Strong imagery. Pg. 148 =="What makes us most human is the possession of a unique and irreproducible story, that we take place over time and leave behind our traces."== ---> see what Joscha Bach calls "our personal aesthetics" and Manolis Kelis calls "our bagage" Pg.177 "we experience time and space unconsciously"