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John Maxwell Coetzee

362.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
Don’t Get Depressed

Whatever you do, don’t allow yourself to get depressed.
361.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
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.
360.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
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.
358.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
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.
356.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
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.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
The Real Real Thing

Why is it that we—men and women both, but men most of all—are prepared to accept the checks and rebuffs of the real, more and more rebuffs as time goes by, more humiliating each time, yet keep coming back? The answer: because we cannot do without the real thing, the real real thing; because without the real we die as if of thirst.
354.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
Crucifiction

If they knew what goes on in my mind, they would crucify me. I mean, with real nails.
353.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
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.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
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 person—that is, not through one’s art—to denounce some politician or other, using the rhetoric of the agora, one embarks on a contest which one is likely to lose because it takes place on ground where one’s opponent is far more practised and adept. “Of course Mr Pinter is entitled to his point of view”, it will be replied. “After all, he enjoys the freedoms of a democratic society, freedoms which we are this moment endeavouring to protect against extremists.”

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.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
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 to distinguish—indeed, few are capable of distinguishing—between sincerity and the performance of sincerity, just as few distinguish between religious faith and religious observance. To the dubious question, Is this true faith? or, Is this true sincerity? one receives only a blank look. Truth? What is that? Sincerity? Of course I’m sincere—didn’t I say so?
349.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
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.
348.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
Dishonour

In the twentieth century, when man rapes a woman, it is the man’s dishonour.
347.

John Maxwell Coetzee, “Diary of a Bad Year”
Unsuitable Death

It is the nature of death that everything about it, every last thing, should strike us as unsuitable.