John Maxwell Coetzee
362. |
Don’t Get Depressed
Whatever you do, don’t allow yourself to get depressed.
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361. |
Bach For Free
The best proof we have that life is good, and therefore that there may perhaps be a God after all, who has our welfare at heart, is that to each of us, on the day we are born, comes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited, for free.
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360. |
Honest Relationship
You can’t be honest in a marriage-type relationship where you live together, not absolutely honest, not if you want it to last. That is one of the down things about marriage.
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358. |
Boredom
While it may be so that only the higher animals are capable of boredom, man proves himself highest of all by domesticating boredom, giving it a home.
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356. |
On compassion
Every day for the past week the thermometer has risen above the forty-degree mark. Bella Sanders in the flat down the corridor tells me of her concern for the frogs along the old creek bed. Will they not be baked alive in their little earthern chambers? she asks anxiously. Can we not do something to help them? What do you suggest? I say. Can we not dig them out and bring them indoors until the heatwave is over? she says. I caution her against trying. You won’t know where to dig, I say.
Towards sunset I observe her carry a plastic bowl of water across the street, which he leaves in the creek. In case the little ones get thirsty, she explains. It is easy to make fun of people like Bella, to point out that heatwaves are part of a larger ecological process with which human beings ought not to interfere. But does this criticism not miss something? Are we human beings not part of that ecology too, and is our compassion for the wee beasties not as much an element of it as is the cruelty of the crow? |
355. |
The Real Real Thing
Why is it
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354. |
Crucifiction
If they knew what goes on in my mind, they would crucify me. I mean, with real nails.
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353. |
How Civility Works— No, — replied Alan. — We will go. He makes a gesture, we make a gesture in return. That is civility. That is how civility works. You have relations with people even if you don’t like them. |
351. |
On Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature, is too ill to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. But in a recorded lecture he makes what can fairly be called a savage attack on Tony Blair for his part in the war in Iraq, calling for him to be put on trial as a war criminal.
When one speaks in one’s own So it takes some gumption to speak as Pinter has spoken. Who knows, perhaps Pinter sees quite clearly that he will be slickly refuted, disparaged, even ridiculed. Despite which he fires the first shot and steels himself for the reply. What he has done may be foolhardy but it is not cowardly. And there come tunes when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act, that is to say, speak. |
350. |
Sincere Sincerity
First Adam Smith placed reason in the service of interest; now sentiment is placed in the service of interest too. In the course of this latter development, the concept of sincerity is gutted of all meaning. In the present “culture”, few care
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349. |
Mathematico-mysticism
It is what I call mathematico-mysticism. Mathematics is not the some arcane mumbo-jumbo about the nature of the number one versus the nature of the number two. It is not about the nature of anything at all. Mathematics is an activity, a goal-directed activity, like running. Running doesn’t have a nature. Running is what you do when you want to get from A to B in a hurry. Mathematics is what you do when you want to get from Q to A, from question to answer, quickly and reliably.
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348. |
Dishonour
In the twentieth century, when man rapes a woman, it is the man’s dishonour.
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347. |
Unsuitable Death
It is the nature of death that everything about it, every last thing, should strike us as unsuitable.
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