{"id":12438,"date":"2026-02-17T20:59:51","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T00:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/olga-tokarczuks-magnificent-nobel-prize-acceptance-speech-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T20:59:51","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T00:59:51","slug":"olga-tokarczuks-magnificent-nobel-prize-acceptance-speech-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/olga-tokarczuks-magnificent-nobel-prize-acceptance-speech-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Olga Tokarczuk\u2019s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\u201cI have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,\u201d James Baldwin observed as he offered his lifeline for the hour of despair<\/a>. \u201cI am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.\u201d <\/p>\n

When we do save each other, it is always with some version of the mightiest lifeline we humans are capable of weaving: tenderness \u2014 the best adaptation we have to our existential inheritance as \u201cthe fragile species.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Like all orientations of the spirit, tenderness is a story we tell ourselves \u2014 about each other, about the world, about our place in it and our power in it. Like all narratives, the strength of our tenderness reflects the strength and sensitivity of our storytelling. <\/p>\n

That is what the Polish psychologist turned poet and novelist Olga Tokarczuk<\/strong> explores in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Olga Tokarczuk by Harald Krichel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tokarczuk recounts a moment from her early childhood that deeply moved her: Her mother, inverting Montaigne\u2019s notion that \u201cto lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago,\u201d<\/a> told her small daughter that she missed her even before she was born \u2014 an astonishing gesture of love so total that it bends the arrow of time. Across the abyss of a lifetime, along the arrow of time that eventually shot through her mother\u2019s life, Tokarczuk reflects: <\/p>\n

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A young woman who was never religious \u2014 my mother \u2014 gave me something once known as a soul, thereby furnishing me with the world\u2019s greatest tender narrator.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Our present bind, Tokarczuk observes, is that the old narratives about who we are and how the world works are untender and clearly broken, but we are yet to find tender new ones to take their place. Observing that in our sensemaking cosmogony \u201cthe world is made of words\u201d yet \u201cwe lack the language, we lack the points of view, the metaphors, the myths and new fables,\u201d she laments the tyranny of selfing<\/a> that has taken their place:<\/p>\n

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We live in a reality of polyphonic first-person narratives, and we are met from all sides with polyphonic noise. What I mean by first-person is the kind of tale that narrowly orbits the self of a teller who more or less directly just writes about herself and through herself. We have determined that this type of individualized point of view, this voice from the self, is the most natural, human and honest, even if it does abstain from a broader perspective. Narrating in the first person, so conceived, is weaving an absolutely unique pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This optics of the self, the way in which the individual becomes \u201csubjective center of the world,\u201d is the defining feature of this most recent chapter of the history of our species. And yet everything around us reveals its illusory nature, for as the great naturalist John Muir observed, \u201cwhen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Arthur Rackham from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With an eye to her lifelong fascination with \u201cthe systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors\u201d \u2014 the subject of her Nobel-winning compatriot Wis\u0142awa Szymborska\u2019s poem \u201cLove at First Sight\u201d<\/a> \u2014 Tokarczuk reflects on our creativity not as some separate and abstract faculty but as a fractal of the living universe:<\/p>\n

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We are all \u2014 people, plants, animals, and objects \u2014 immersed in a single space, which is ruled by the laws of physics. This common space has its shape, and within it the laws of physics sculpt an infinite number of forms that are incessantly linked to one another. Our cardiovascular system is like the system of a river basin, the structure of a leaf is like a human transport system, the motion of the galaxies is like the whirl of water flowing down our washbasins. Societies develop in a similar way to colonies of bacteria. The micro and macro scale show an endless system of similarities.<\/p>\n

Our speech, thinking and creativity are not something abstract, removed from the world, but a continuation on another level of its endless processes of transformation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We sever this dazzling indivisibility whenever we contract into what she calls \u201cthe uncommunicative prison of one\u2019s own self\u201d \u2014 something magnified in all the compulsive sharing on so-called social media with their basic paradigm of selfing masquerading as connection<\/a>. Instead, she invites us to look \u201cex-centrically\u201d and imagine a different story \u2014 one tasked with \u201crevealing a greater range of reality and showing the mutual connections.\u201d Amid a world riven by \u201ca multitude of stories that are incompatible with one another or even openly hostile toward each other, mutually antagonizing,\u201d accelerated by techno-capitalist media systems that prey on the greatest vulnerabilities of human nature, Tokarczuk reminds us that literature is also an invaluable tool of empathy \u2014 an antidote to the divisiveness so mercilessly exploited by our \u201csocial\u201d media:<\/p>\n

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Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Art<\/a>
Century-old art by the adolescent Virginia Frances Sterrett<\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She calls for something beyond empathy, something achingly missing from our harsh culture of dueling gotchas \u2014 a literature of tenderness:<\/p>\n

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Tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences, the situations people have endured and their memories. Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Echoing Iris Murdoch\u2019s unforgettable definition of love as \u201cthe extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,\u201d<\/a> Tokarczuk adds:<\/p>\n

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Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy.<\/p>\n

It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our \u201cself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.<\/p>\n

Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin on storytelling as a force of redemption<\/a>, then revisit Toni Morrison\u2019s superb Nobel Prize acceptance speech about the power of language<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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