“…life on this planet gets developed by some powerful force contained in every atom of organic matter. It’s a force there is no physical evidence of, for the time being––you cannot catch it on even the most precise microscopic images, nor in photographs of the atomic spectrum. It’s a thing that consists in bursting open, thrusting forward, in constantly going beyond what it is. That is the engine that drives change, a blind and powerful energy. To ascribe goals or intentions to it is to misunderstand….

…This––what other word to use?––lives, has a million traits and qualities, so that everything is contained within it, and there is nothing that might lie outside of it, all death is part of life, and in some sense there is no death. There are no errors. There are no guilty parties and no innocents, either, no merits, no sins, no good or evil; whoever thought up those notions led humankind astray.”

~Olga Tokarczuk, Flights, Riverhead Books 2018, p.286.