Aldrin

“If you take a close look at an object, with your eyes closed to avoid being deceived by the appearances that things exude around themselves, if you allow yourself to be mistrustful, you can see their true faces, at least for a moment.

Things are beings steeped in another reality, where there is no time or motion. Only their surface can be seen. The rest, hidden elsewhere, defines the significance and meaning of each material object. A coffee grinder, for example.

The grinder is just such a piece of material infused with the concept of grinding.

Grinders grind, and that is why they exist. But no one knows what the grinder means in general. Perhaps the grinder is a splinter off some total, fundamental law of transformation, a law without which this world could not go round or would be completely different. Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people. And perhaps Misia’s one single grinder is the pillar of what is called Primeval.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times

“People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. Animals sense that they live more intensely than plants and things. Plants dream that they live more intensely than things. But things last, and this lasting is more alive than anything else.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times

“Then for a brief moment he saw everything completely differently. Open space, empty and endless, stretched away in all “directions. Everything within this dead expanse, every living thing was helpless and alone. Things were happening by accident, and when the accident failed, automatic law appeared – the rhythmical machinery of nature, the cogs and pistons of history, conformity with the rules that was rotting from the inside and crumbling to dust. Cold and sorrow reigned everywhere. Every creature was trying to huddle up to something, to cling to something, to things, to each other, but all that resulted was suffering and despair.

The quality of what Izydor saw was temporality. Under a colourful outer coating everything was merging in collapse, decay, and destruction.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times

“Knowledge that is grown only on the outside changes nothing inside a man, or merely changes him on the surface, as one garment is changed for another. But he who learns by taking things inside himself undergoes constant transformation, because he incorporates what he learns into his being.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times