Background Image

...

In Its Conception The Literature Prize Belongs To Days When A Writer Could Still Be Thought Of As, By Virtue Of His Or Her Occupation, A Sage, Someone With No Institutional Affiliations Who Could Offer An Authoritative Word On Our Times As Well As On Our Moral Life.

-J. M. Coetzee

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

In Its Conception The

J. M. Coetzee

...

In Its Conception The Literature Prize Belongs To Days When A Writer Could Still Be Thought Of As, By Virtue Of His Or Her Occupation, A Sage, Someone With No Institutional Affiliations Who Could Offer An Authoritative Word On Our Times As Well As On Our Moral Life.

Views: 23556

Topic

More From J. M. Coetzee

When All Else Fails, Philosophize.

When All Else Fails

Pleasure Is Hard To Come By, But Pain Is Everywhere These Days, I Must Learn To Subsist On It.

That Was Our First Time Together. Interesting, An Interesting Experience, But Not Earth-shaking. But Then, I Never Expected It To Be Earth-shaking, Not With Him. What I Was Determined To Avoid Was Emotional Entanglement. A Passing Fling Was One Thing, An Affair Of The Heart Quite Another. Of Myself I Was Fairly Sure. I Was Not About To Lose My Heart To A Man About Whom I Knew Next To Nothing.

The Gods, The Immortals, Were The Inventors Of Death And Corruption; Yet With One Or Two Notable Exceptions They Have Lacked The Courage To Try Their Invention Out On Themselves.

It Is Not, Then, In The Content Or Substance Of Folly That Its Difference From Truth Lies, But In Where It Comes From. It Comes Not From 'the Wise Man's Mouth' But From The Mouth Of The Subject Assumed Not To Know And Speak The Truth.

There Is Nothing More Humanly Beautiful Than A Woman's Breasts. Nothing More Humanly Beautiful, Nothing More Humanly Mysterious Than Why Men Should Want To Caress, Over And Over Again, With Paintbrush Or Chisel Or Hand, These Oddly Curved Fatty Sacs, And Nothing More Humanly Endearing Than Our Complicity (i Mean The Complicity Of Women) In Their Obsession.

All Creatures Come Into The World Bringing With Them The Memory Of Justice.

As For September 11, Let Us Not Too Easily Grant The Americans Possession Of That Date On The Calendar. Like May 1 Or July 14 Or December 25, September 11 May Seem Full Of Significance To Some People, While To Other People It Is Just Another Day.

What Is Miraculous About The Past Is That We Have Succeeded--god Knows How--in Making Thousands And Millions Of Individual Human Beings, Lock Well Enought Into One Another To Give Us What Looks Like A Common Past, A Shared Story.

Can Desire Grow Out Of Admiration, Or Are The Two Quite Distinct Species? What Would It Be Like To Lie Side By Side, Naked, Breast To Breast, With A Woman One Principally Admires?

The Idea Of Writer As Sage Is Pretty Much Dead Today. I Would Certainly Feel Very Uncomfortable In The Role.

The Mode Of Consciousness Of Nonhuman Species Is Quite Different From Human Consciousness.

Long Visits Don't Make For Good Friends.

The Devil Is Everywhere Under The Skin Of Things, Searching For A Way Into The Light.

My Existence From Day To Day Has Become A Matter Of Averting My Eyes, Of Cringing. Death Is The Only Truth Left. Death Is What I Cannot Bear To Think. At Every Moment When I Am Thinking Of Something Else, I Am Not Thinking Death, Am Not Thinking The Truth.

It Gets Harder All The Time, Bev Shaw Once Said. Harder, Yet Easier. One Gets Used To Things Getting Harder; One Ceases To Be Surprised That What Used To Be Hard As Hard Can Be Grows Harder Yet.

Deprived Of Human Intercourse, I Inevitably Overvalue The Imagination And Expect It To Make The Mundane Glow With An Aura Of Self-transcendence. Yet Why These Glorious Sunsets, I Ask Myself, If Nature Does Not Speak To Us With Tongues Of Fire.

Censorship Is Not An Occupation That Attracts Intelligent, Subtle Minds. Censors Can And Often Have Been Outwitted. But The Game Of Slipping Aesopian Messages Past The Censor Is Ultimately A Sterile One, Diverting Writers From Their Proper Task.

Pain Is Truth; All Else Is Subject To Doubt.

The Highest Type Of Intelligence, Says Aristotle, Manifests Itself In An Ability To See Connections Where No One Has Seen Them Before, That Is, To Think Analogically.

Nothing Is Worse Than What We Can Imagine.

For Himself, Then. For His Idea Of The World, A World In Which Men Do Not Use Shovels To Beat Corpses Into A More Convenient Shape For Processing.

There Seemed Nothing To Do But Live.

If I, This Mortal Shell, Am Going To Die, Let Me At Least Live On Through My Creations.

Machiavelli Says That If As A Ruler You Accept That Your Every Action Must Pass Moral Scrutiny, You Will Without Fail Be Defeated By An Opponent Who Submits To No Such Moral Test. To Hold On To Power, You Have Not Only To Master The Crafts Of Deception And Treachery But To Be Prepared To Use Them Where Necessary.

He Even Knew The Reason Why: Because Enough Men Had Gone Off To War Saying The Time For Gardening Was When The War Was Over; Whereas There Must Be Men To Stay Behind And Keep Gardening Alive, Or At Least The Idea Of Gardening; Because Once That Cord Was Broken, The Earth Would Grow Hard And Forget Her Children. That Was Why.

But It Is The Knowledge Of How Contingent My Unease Is, How Dependent On A Baby That Wails Beneath My Window One Day And Does Not Wail The Next, That Brings The Worst Shame To Me, The Greatest Indifference To Annihilation. I Know Somewhat Too Much; And From This Knowledge, Once One Has Been Infected, There Seems To Be No Recovering. I Ought Never To Have Taken My Lantern To See What Was Going On In The Hut By The Granary. On The Other Hand, There Was No Way, Once I Had Picked Up The Lantern, For Me To Put It Down Again. The Knot Loops In Upon Itself; I Cannot Find The End.

You Are Going To End Up As One Of Those Sad Old Men Who Poke Around In Rubbish Bins.” “i’m Going To End Up In A Hole In The Ground... And So Are You. So Are We All.

No, Paul, I Couldn't Care Less If You Tell Me Made-up Stories. Our Lies Reveal As Much About Us As Our Truths.' (said To Paul By Elizabeth Costello, The Interloping Novelist-angel-inner Voice).

Made Up Stories

Belief May Be No More, In The End, Than A Source Of Energy, Like A Battery Which One Clips Into An Idea To Make It Run.

A Book Should Be An Axe To Chop Open The Frozen Sea Inside Us.

There Is First Of All The Problem Of The Opening, Namely, How To Get Us From Where We Are, Which Is, As Yet, Nowhere, To The Far Bank. It Is A Simple Bridging Problem, A Problem Of Knocking Together A Bridge. People Solve Such Problems Every Day. They Solve Them, And Having Solved Them Push On.

He Would Not Mind Hearing Petrus's Story One Day. But Preferably Not Reduced To English. More And More He Is Convinced That English Is An Unfit Medium For The Truth Of South Africa. Stretches Of English Code Whole Sentences Long Have Thickened, Lost Their Articulations, Their Articulateness, Their Articulatedness. Like A Dinosaur Expiring And Settling In The Mud, The Language Has Stiffened. Pressed Into The Mold Of English, Petrus's Story Would Come Out Arthritic, Bygone"(117).

He Continues To Teach Because It Provides Him With A Livelihood; Also Because It Teaches Him Humility, Brings It Home To Him Who He Is In The World. The Irony Does Not Escape Him: That The One Who Comes To Teach Learns The Keenest Of Lessons, While Those Who Come To Learn Learn Nothing.

If You Were Blind You Would Hardly Have Fallen In Love In The First Place. But Now, Do You Truly Wish To See The Beloved In The Cold Clarity Of The Visual Apparatus? It May Be In Your Better Interest To Throw A Veil Over The Gaze, So As To Keep Her Alive In Her Archetypal, Goddesslike Form.

One Thought Alone Preoccupies The Submerged Mind Of Empire: How Not To End, How Not To Die, How To Prolong Its Era. By Day It Pursues Its Enemies. It Is Cunning And Ruthless, It Sends Its Bloodhounds Everywhere. By Night It Feeds On Images Of Disaster: The Sack Of Cities, The Rape Of Populations, Pyramids Of Bones, Acres Of Desolation.

If It Is Indeed Impossible - Or At Least Very Difficult - To Inhabit The Consciousness Of An Animal, Then In Writing About Animals There Is A Temptation To Project Upon Them Feelings And Thoughts That May Belong Only To Our Own Human Mind And Heart.

I Am Not The We Of Anyone

One Day Some As Yet Unborn Scholar Will Recognize In The Clock The Machine That Has Tamed The Wilds.

There Are Works Of Literature Whose Influence Is Strong But Indirect Because It Is Mediated Through The Whole Of The Culture Rather Than Immediately Through Imitation. Wordsworth Is The Case That Comes To Mind.

I Said To Myself, 'if You Don't Sit Down To It Today, When Will You Ever Sit Down To It?'

I Say That I Represent This Movement Because My Intellectual Allegiances Are Clearly European, Not African.

I Know Somewhat Too Much; And From This Knowledge, Once One Has Been Infected, There Seems To Be No Recovering.

Artists No Longer Starve In Garrets. Some People May Think This Is Not Wholly A Good Thing, That Being An Artist Has Become Too Comfortable, At Least In The West. I'm Not Sure I Agree. It's A Mark Of Civilization To Encourage The Arts And The Life Of The Mind.

Speaking The Words He Had Been Taught, Directing Them No Longer Upward But To The Earth On Which He Knelt, He Prayed: 'for What We Are About To Receive Make Us Truly Thankful.' ... He... Felt His Heart Suddenly Flow Over With Thankfulness... Like A Gush Of Warm Water... All That Remains Is To Live Here Quietly For The Rest Of My Life, Eating Food That My Own Labour Has Made The Earth To Yield. All That Remains Is To Be A Tender Of The Soil.

In A World Of Chance Is There A Better And A Worse? We Yield To A Stranger's Embrace Or Give Ourselves To The Waves; For The Blink Of An Eyelid Our Vigilance Relaxes; We Are Asleep; And When We Awake, We Have Lost The Direction Of Our Lives. What Are These Blinks Of An Eyelid, Against Which The Only Defence Is An Eternal And Inhuman Wakefulness? Might They Not Be The Cracks And Chinks Through Which Another Voice, Other Voices, Speak In Our Lives? By What Right Do We Close Our Ears To Them? (susan Barton)

I See No Marks Of Wordsworths Style Of Writing Or Style Of Thinking In My Own Work, Yet Wordsworth Is A Constant Presence When I Write About Human Beings And Their Relations To The Natural World.

Temperament Is Fixed, Set. The Skull, Followed By The Temperament: The Two Hardest Parts Of The Body. Follow Your Temperament. It Is Not A Philosophy, It Is A Rule, Like The Rule Of St Benedict.

Sleep Is No Longer A Healing Bath, A Recuperation Of Vital Forces, But An Oblivion, A Nightly Brush With Annihilation.

Yet What Happened In Fact? In The Middle Of The Night John Woke Up And Saw Me Sleeping Beside Him With No Doubt A Look Of Peace On My Face, Even Of Bliss, Bliss Is Not Unattainable In This World. He Saw Me—saw Me As I Was At That Moment—took Fright, Hurriedly Strapped The Armour Back Over His Heart, This Time With Chains And A Double Padlock, And Stole Out Into The Darkness.

I Must Not Fall Asleep In The Middle Of My Life. Out Of The Blankness That Surrounds Me I Must Pluck The Incident After Incident After Incident Whose Little Explosions Keep Me Going.

Children All Over The World Consort Quite Naturally With Animals. They Don't See Any Dividing Line. That Is Something They Have To Be Taught, Just As They Have To Be Taught It Is All Right To Kill And Eat Them.

To The Last We Have Learned Nothing. In All Of Us, Deep Down, There Seems To Be Something Granite And Unteachable. No One Truly Believes, Despite The Hysteria In The Streets That The World Of Tranquil Certainties We Were Born Into Is About To Be Extinguished.

The Most Important Of All Rights Is The Right To Life, And I Cannot Foresee A Day When Domesticated Animals Will Be Granted That Right In Law.

His Own Opinion, Which He Does Not Air, Is That The Origin Of Speech Lie In Song, And The Origins Of Song In The Need To Fill Out With Sound The Overlarge And Rather Empty Human Soul.

The Barbarians Come Out At Night.

We Must Cultivate, All Of Us, A Certain Ignorance, A Certain Blindness, Or Society Will Not Be Tolerable.

Unimaginable Perhaps; But The Unimaginable Is There To Be Imagined.

In Its Conception The Literature Prize Belongs To Days When A Writer Could Still Be Thought Of As, By Virtue Of His Or Her Occupation, A Sage, Someone With No Institutional Affiliations Who Could Offer An Authoritative Word On Our Times As Well As On Our Moral Life.

Restoration Is A Skilled Profession. You Might Even Call It An Art In Its Own Right, Except That It Is Frowned On To Be Original. First Rule Of Restoration: Follow The Intention Of The Artist. Never Try To Improve On Him.

My Response, A Dubious And Hesitant One, Is That It Has Been And May Continue To Be, In The Time That Is Left To Me, More Productive To Live Out The Question Than To Try To Answer It In Abstract Terms.

As You See, I Do Not Treat The Creation Of Fiction, That To Say The Invention And Development Of Fantasies,as A Form Of Abstract Thought. I Dont Wish To Deny The Uses Of The Intellect,but Sometimes One Has The Intuition That The Intellect By Itself Will Lead One Nowhere.

To Me, A Philosopher Who Says That The Distinction Between Human And Nonhuman Depends On Whether You Have A White Or A Black Skin, And A Philosopher Who Says That The Distinction Between Human And Nonhuman Depends On Whether Or Not You Know The Difference Between A Subject And A Predicate, Are More Alike Than They Are Unlike.

State Censorship Presents Itself As A Bulwark Between Society And Forces Of Subversion Or Moral Corruption. To Dismiss This Account Of Its Own Motives By The State As Insincere Would Be A Mistake: It Is A Feature Of The Paranoid Logic Of The Censoring Mentality That Virtue ... Must Be Innocent, And Therefore, Unless Protected, Vulnerable To The Wiles Of Vice.

Moral Corruption

If There Were A Better, Clearer, Shorter Way Of Saying What The Fiction Says, Then Why Not Scrap The Fiction?

We Are Not By Nature Cruel.

Anyone Who Says That Life Matters Less To An Animal Than It Does To Us Has Not Held In His Hands An Animal Fighting For Its Life. The Whole Of The Being Of The Animal Is Thrown Into That Fight, Without Reserve. When You Say That The Fight Lacks A Dimension Of Intellectual Or Imaginative Horror, I Agree. It Is Not The Mode Of Being Animals To Have An Intellectual Horror: Their Whole Being Is In The Living Flesh...i Urge You To Walk, Flank To Flank, Beside The Beast That Is Prodded Down The Chute To His Executioner.

I Am Corrupted To The Bone With The Beauty Of This Forsaken World.

Music Expresses Feeling, That Is To Say, Gives Shape And Habitation To Feeling, Not In Space But In Time. To The Extent That Music Has A History That Is More Than A History Of Its Formal Evolution, Our Feelings Must Have A History Too. Perhaps Certain Qualities Of Feeling That Found Expression In Music Can Be Recorded By Being Notated On Paper, Have Become So Remote That We Can No Longer Inhabit Them As Feelings, Can Get A Grasp Of Them Only After Long Training In The History And Philosophy Of Music, The Philosophical History Of Music, The History Of Music As A History Of The Feeling Soul.

His Mind Has Become A Refuge For Old Thoughts, Idle, Indigent, With Nowhere Else To Go. He Ought To Chase Them Out, Sweep The Premises Clean. But He Does Not Care To Do So, Or Does Not Care Enough"(72).

I Want To Find A Way Of Speaking To Fellow Human Beings That Will Be Cool Rather Than Heated, Philosophical Rather Than Polemical, That Will Bring Enlightenment Rather Than Seeking To Divide Us Into The Righteous And The Sinners, The Saved And The Damned, The Sheep And The Goats.

Just As We Bemoan The Passing Away Of The Great Novel, A Great Novelist Is Likely To Emerge, Perhaps Even From Denmark Or Switzerland, To Prove Us Wrong.

Truth Is Not Spoken In Anger. Truth Is Spoken, If It Ever Comes To Be Spoken, In Love. The Gaze Of Love Is Not Deluded. It Sees What Is Best In The Beloved Even When What Is Best In The Beloved Finds It Hard To Emerge Into The Light.

You Think You Know What Is Just And What Is Not. I Understand. We All Think We Know." I Had No Doubt, Myself, Then, That At Each Moment Each One Of Us, Man, Woman, Child, Perhaps Even The Poor Old Horse Turning The Mill-wheel, Knew What Was Just: All Creatures Come Into The World Bringing With Them The Memory Of Justice. "but We Live In A World Of Laws," I Said To My Poor Prisoner, "a World Of The Second-best. There Is Nothing We Can Do About That. We Are Fallen Creatures. All We Can Do Is To Uphold The Laws, All Of Us, Without Allowing The Memory Of Justice To Fade.

The End Of Confession Is To Tell The Truth To And For Oneself.

Telling The Truth

Reason Is Simply A Vast Tautology.

Erasmus Dramatizes A Well-established Political Position: That Of The Fool Who Claims License To Criticize All And Sundry Without Reprisal, Since His Madness Defines Him As Not Fully A Person And Therefore Not A Political Being With Political Desires And Ambitions. The Praise Of Folly, Therefore Sketches The Possibility Of A Position For The Critic Of The Scene Of Political Rivalry, A Position Not Simply Impartial Between The Rivals But Also, By Self-definition, Off The Stage Of Rivalry Altogether.

Once I Lived In Time As A Fish In Water, Breathing It, Drinking It, Sustained By It. Now I Kill Time And Time Kills Me.

From One Seed A Whole Handful: That Was What It Meant To Say The Bounty Of The Earth.

[hariharan Is] An Outstanding Writer.

She Gives Him What He Can Only Call A Sweet Smile. 'so You Are Determined To Go On Being Bad. Mad, Bad, And Dangerous To Know. I Promise, No One Will Ask You To Change.

And Anyway, I Suspect He Secretly Liked It When A Woman Was Cold And Distant

In Order To Be Cruel We Have To Close Our Hearts To The Suffering Of The Other.

His Mouth Opens. From Inside Him Comes A Slow Stream, Without Breath, Without Interruption. It Flows Up Through His Body And Out Upon Me; It Passes Through The Cabin, Through The Wreck; Washing The Cliffs And Shores Of The Island, It Runs Northward And Southward To The Ends Of The Earth. Soft And Cold, Dark And Unending, It Beats Against My Eyelids, Against The Skin Of My Face.

...the Program Of Scientific Experimentation That Leads You To Conclude That Animals Are Imbeciles Is Profoundly Anthropocentric. It Values Being Able To Find Your Way Out Of A Sterile Maze, Ignoring The Fact That If The Researcher Who Designed The Maze Were To Be Parachuted Into The Jungles Of Borneo, He Or She Would Be Dead Of Starvation In A Week...if I As A Human Being Were Told That The Standards By Which Animals Are Being Measured In These Experiments Are Human Standards, I Would Be Insulted.

It Is A World Of Words That Creates A World Of Things.

He Knows Too Much About Himself To Subject Her To A Morning After, When He Will Be Cold, Surly, Impatient To Be Alone.

Despair ... Is Like A Gas, Odourless, Tasteless, Without Nourishment. You Breathe It In, Your Limbs Relax, You Cease To Care, Even At The Moment When The Steel Touches Your Throat.

Perhaps; But I Am A Difficult Person To Live With. My Difficulty Consists In Not Wanting To Live With Other People.

(i)f We Are Going To Be Kind, Let It Be Out Of Simple Generosity, Not Because We Fear Guilt Or Retribution.

I Am Spoken To Not In Words, Which Come To Me Quaint And Veiled, But In Signs, In Conformations Of Face And Hands, In Postures Of Shoulders And Feet, In Nuances Of Tune And Tone, In Gaps And Absences Whose Grammar Has Never Been Recorded.

All Over The World, As Governments Retreat From Their Traditional Duty To Foster The Common Good And Reconceive Of Themselves As Mere Managers Of National Economies, Universities Have Been Coming Under Pressure To Turn Themselves Into Training Schools Equipping Young People With The Skills Required By A Modern Economy.

Our Lies Reveal As Much About Us As Our Truths

The Writers Who Have The Deepest Influence On One Are Those One Reads In Ones More Impressionable, Early Life, And Often It Is The More Youthful Works Of Those Writers That Leave The Deepest Imprint.

It Seemed To Me That All Things Were Possible On The Island, All Tyrannies And Cruelties, Though In Small; And If, In Despite Of What Was Possible, We Lived At Peace With Another, Surely This Was Proof That Certain Laws Unknown To Us Held Sway, Or Else That We Had Been Following The Promptings Of Our Hearts All This Time, And Our Hearts Had Not Betrayed Us.

Strictly Speaking, My Interest Is Not In Legal Rights For Animals But In A Change Of Heart Towards Animals.

I Speak To The Broken Halves Of All Our Selves And Tell Them To Embrace, Loving The Worst In Us Equally With The Best.

It’s Admirable, What You Do, What She Does, But To Me Animal-welfare People Are A Bit Like Christians Of A Certain Kind. Everyone Is So Cheerful And Well-intentioned That After A While You Itch To Go Off And Do Some Raping And Pillaging. Or To Kick A Cat.

So It Has Come, The Day Of Testing. Without Warning, Without Fanfare, It Is Here, And He Is In The Middle Of It. In His Chest His Heart Hammers So Hard That It Too, In Its Dumb Way, Must Know. How Will They Stand Up To The Testing, He And His Heart?

Was It Serious? I Don't Know. It Certainly Had Serious Consequences.

Scapegoating Worked In Practice While It Still Had Religious Powers Behind It. You Loaded The Sins Of The City On To The Goat’s Back And Drove It Out, And The City Was Cleansed. It Worked Because Everyone Knew How To Read The Ritual, Including The Gods. Then The Gods Died, And All Of A Sudden You Had To Cleanse The City Without Divine Help. Real Actions Were Demanded Instead Of Symbolism The Censor Was Born, In The Roman Sense. Watchfulness Became The Watchword: The Watchfulness Of All Over All. Purgation Was Replaced By The Purge.

But The Truth, He Knows, Is Otherwise. His Pleasure In Living Has Been Snuffed Out. Like A Leaf On A Stream, Like A Puffball On A Breeze, He Has Begun To Float Towards His End. He Sees It Quite Clearly, And It Fills Him With (the Word Will Not Go Away) Despair. The Blood Of Life Is Leaving His Body And Despair Is Taking Its Place, Despair That Is Like A Gas, Odourless, Tasteless, Without Nourishment. You Breathe It In, Your Limbs Relax, You Cease To Care, Even At The Moment When The Steel Touches Your Throat.

Let Me Say It Openly: We Are Surrounded By An Enterprise Of Degradation, Cruelty, And Killing Which Rivals Anything The Third Reich Was Capable Of, Indeed Dwarfs It, In That Ours Is An Enterprise Without End, Self-regenerating, Bringing Rabbits, Rats, Poultry, Livestock Ceaselessly Into The World For The Purpose Of Killing Them.

Perhaps We Invented The Gods So That We Could Put The Blame On Them. They Gave Us Permission To Eat Flesh. They Gave Us Permission To Play With Unclean Things. It's Not Our Fault, It's Theirs. We're Just Their Children.

The Modern State Appeals To Morality, To Religion, And To Natural Law As The Ideological Foundation Of Its Existence. At The Same Time It Is Prepared To Infringe Any Or All Of These In The Interest Of Self-preservation.

Trending Author

Category