My purpose, here, is to recommend a Good Book. Not "the" Good Book (the Bible), though there are a few similarities. There are also a lot of differences. For one thing, the practice of astrology figures prominently in the book I am recommending. In the Bible, not so much!
This book is particularly recommended if you like William Blake, love animals (deer and dogs are both featured), and if you disparage and dislike hunting.
The author of the book I am recommending is Olga Tokarczuk, who is pictured above. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, and the book I just read won the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. Stand by! Here's the title:
Bob Dylan, another Nobel Laureate, has a comparable piece of advice: "Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you."
A friend gave me a copy of Tokarczuk's book for my birthday. I am intending to gift you with my recommendation. On Page 218, I read the sentences that convinced me that I should pass my recommendation on to others. Here it is:
Life is like an extremely demanding testing ground. From now on everything you do will count; every thought and every deed, but not for you to be punished or rewarded afterward, but because it is they that build your world.
We are done with January. That's the month we think about new things. As Hannah Arendt would almost certainly counsel, it is quite possible to do new things, and to surprise ourselves, and to surprise everyone else, too. I suggest that we surprise everyone this year and build a brand new, better world!
Every thought, and every deed, and everything we do will count!
Image Credit:
https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-10-10/olga-tokarczuk-destined-win-nobel-prize-says-jennifer-croft-her-translator
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