Wieslaw Mysliwski - A Treatise on Shelling Beans

But who on earth am I, what right do I have to them, to these faces that happen to be fixed in my memory and are with me as if my life were their life too? I feel as if those faces have left their stamp on me inside. I try to put them out of my mind, without success. I sometimes even have the impression that they themselves are asking me not to forget them. I tell you, it’s not easy living with so many faces inside yourself, not knowing anything about them.

Though occasionally the opposite also happens. For example, I’ll have been traveling by train, sitting opposite someone, and as often happens on a train, we couldn’t help talking a bit with one another, and I can remember the day and date and the time the train departed, what its arrival time was, he got out and I continued on and I even thought about him later, but I couldn’t recall his face. So you and I may have traveled one time in the same train, in the same compartment, we could have talked, I could have thought about you afterwards, and now for some reason I can’t recall your face aside from the fact that it seems familiar. Maybe we were on a plane together, or a ship. So you don’t remember me either?

No, I don’t mind. You had no reason to pay any attention to me. Why would you? Memory has no obligation of reciprocity, you didn’t have to notice me. Me, I try and remember this and that if only to maintain order, to try and keep everything neat and tidy. Maybe that’ll help me find myself also. Order isn’t only what you suppress, it’s what you allow. No, it isn’t that alone. That may not even be it at all. Sometimes I have the impression that it’s something like the flip side of life, where everything has its place and its time, things proceed not just according to their own wishes, and nothing can go beyond the limits imposed by order. I don’t know if you’ll agree with me on this, but it’s order that turns our life into fate. Not to mention that we’re merely specks in the order of the world. That’s why the world is so incomprehensible to us — because we’re nothing more than specks within it. Without order people wouldn’t be able to put up with themselves. The world wouldn’t be able to put up with itself. Even God, would he be God without order? Though people are the strangest beings in the world, who knows if they aren’t even stranger than God. And they refuse to understand that it’s better for them to know their place, their time, their limits. I mean, the fact that we’re born and we die, that’s already a sort of order imposed on us.

I’ll be honest with you, even here I wouldn’t have taken on the job of minding the place if they hadn’t agreed it would stop being the way it was up till then, when anything went. Minding the cabins, that also requires giving something up so as to have something else. I said, fine, I’ll do it, but I have to be able to impose order here. Never mind that we’re in nature. Ever since people left nature behind, in doing that they agreed to a different kind of order. If they still lived in nature, nature would do the minding. But since it’s going to be me …

I began by marking out the paths, because people were walking any way their feet took them. They trampled the grass not just in front of the cabins, everywhere you looked it was all trodden down. I had them provide spades, and string to do the laying out. The pegs I made myself. I sketched out where all the paths would be, made a plan for each side of the lake. And can you imagine, they even started objecting to the paths, they said I was restricting their freedom. It made me mad and I said, do they want me to look after the place, yes or no? If so, then we need to get to work. I’m restricting their freedom, can you believe that? And they’re not restricting my freedom? Any reciprocal arrangement is a restriction. Not to mention that I didn’t come here to look after their cabins. I have my nameplates, that’s more than enough for me. Who knows if it isn’t actually too much, because there’s always too much work for one person. I could easily just live my own life, so long as I have my dogs. Besides, I don’t have long to go now. In my spare moments I could go walking in the woods, read, listen to music. That’s right, I brought some books. Not too many, but any of them can be reread, you can do that as often as you like. I always liked reading if I only had the time.

Back when I was working on building sites, whenever the site had a library I’d always borrow books. I had to read at least a few pages before I fell asleep. It depended on how tired I was. But even when I was exhausted I had to, otherwise I couldn’t get to sleep. Even when I was drunk I had to. I’d read even if I didn’t understand what I was reading. Actually, you don’t have to understand right away. You can live any amount of life and you don’t understand that either. I brought a lot of things, TV, radio, cassette player, video, lots of records. It’s all through there in the living room.

I wouldn’t have to know all the people here, know who’s who, which cabin they’re from. But now I do, though I don’t need them for anything. I have to remember who and where and when, who gave what to who and all that. I have to give everyone’s cabin the once-over after each season. I have to do this and that and the other, but I wouldn’t have to do any of it, because I don’t have to do anything at all anymore. They go mushrooming then they ask me to come check whether any of the mushrooms they’ve picked are poisonous. And I have to go, because what would happen if they got poisoned?

I’m restricting their freedom. Like anyone knows what that even means. Or they come to me with all sorts of problems and complaints, and I have to hear them out. It goes without saying that they tattle on each other as well. You can’t have all these cabins and all these people without someone telling on someone else. Sometimes I feel like a priest in the confessional. Except that priests teach you how to forget. They forgive your sins and forget them. But I don’t forgive anything, and I can’t forget either. So who’s restricting whose freedom, tell me that.

Freedom. You could say the word itself conceals its own negation. In the same way that despair lurks in the most beautiful illusion. Because if you understand it as freedom from all constraints, then that includes freedom from yourself. After all, people are their own most troublesome constraints. They can be unbearable to themselves. Some of them are too much for themselves. Uncle Jan for instance, the first example that comes to mind. Nothing in particular happened to make him do what he did. What might have happened, in any case what they suspected him of, maybe he could have endured it somehow or other. People have put up with worse. Did he hang himself because he was free? Or because it was the only way he could get free of himself? I’ll tell you one thing, free people are unpredictable. Not just to other folks. Above all to themselves.

When I think about it sometimes, I come to the conclusion that freedom is just a word, like lots of similar words. They don’t mean what they’re supposed to mean, because that isn’t possible. They aim too high and end up becoming illusions. Which is hardly surprising, since life is just one long series of illusions. We’re guided by illusions, motivated by illusions. Illusions drive us forward, hold us back, determine our goals. We’re born out of illusions, and death is just a transition from one illusion into another.

After all, there are words like that that don’t have any fixed meaning. Words that can adapt to any of our desires, our dreams, our longings, our thoughts. You might say they’re immaterial, words drifting in a universe of other words — that they’re words searching for their own meaning, or to put it more precisely, for their own idea. For example eternity, nothingness. Who knows if freedom isn’t one of those words. Yet you have to beware of words like that, because they can assume any meaning, any idea. Depending on how ready we are to yield to them, and what we intend to use them for. In my view not even nature is free.