Through My Window

A New World Through My Window

By Olga Tokarczuk
Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft.and published by The New Yorker

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Images from my childhood keep coming back to me. There was so much more time then, and it was possible to “waste” it and “kill” it, spending hours just staring out the window.Photograph by Mateusz Slodkowski / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty
The virus has reminded us, after all, of the thing we have been denying so passionately: that we are delicate creatures, composed of the most fragile material. That we die—that we are mortal. That we are not separated from the rest of the world by our “humanity,” by any exceptionality, but that the world is instead a kind of great network in which we are enmeshed, connected with other beings by invisible threads of dependence and influence. That without any regard to how far apart the countries we come from are, or what languages we speak, or what color our skin is, we come down with the same illness, we share the same fears; we die the same death.


From the same issue
“The birds must think we’ve gone extinct.” Tyler Foggatt introduces a series of drawn postcards from illustrators around the world.