Words

"Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange."

J.M. Coetzee

The life of the mind

The life of the mind, he thinks to himself: is that what we have dedicated ourselves to, I and these other lonely wanderers in the bowels of the British museum? Will there be a reward for us one day? Will our solitariness lift, or is the life of the mind its own reward?

Youth
J.M.Coetzee

Go forth masked

On the Mother Tongue

"...For at times, when I listen to the words of English that emerge from my mouth, I have a disquieting sense that the one I hear is not the one I call myself. Rather, it is as though some other person (but who?) were being imitated, followed, even mimicked. Larvatus prodeo. [Descartes - "Go forth masked"]

Perhaps it is so that all languages are, finally, foreign languages, alien to our animal being. But in a way that is precisely inarticulate, inarticulable, English does not feel to me like a resting place, a home. It just happens to be a language over whose resources I have achieved some mastery.

My case can certainly not be unique. Among middle-class Indians, for example, there must be many who have done their schooling in English, who routinely speak English in the workplace and at home (throwing in the odd local locution for colouring), who command other languages only imperfectly, yet who, as they listen to themselves speak or as they read what they have written, have the uneasy feeling that there is something false going on."

Page 195. Diary of a Bad Year
J.M.Coetzee (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2003)

The option to change our minds

From 'Diary of a Bad Year' [Published 2007] by J.M.Coetzee [Nobel Prize, 2003]

Chapter 01: 'On the origins of the state'

"...It is hardly in our power to change the form of the state and impossible to abolish it because, vis-à-vis the state, we are, precisely, powerless. In the myth of the founding of the state as set down by Thomas Hobbes, our descent into powerlessness was voluntary: in order to escape the violence of internecine warfare without end (reprisal upon reprisal, vengeance upon vengeance, the vendetta), we individually and severally yielded up to the state the right to use physical force (right is might, might is right), thereby entering the realm (the protection) of the law. Those who chose and choose to stay outside the compact become outlaw.

...What the Hobbesian myth of origins does not mention is that the handover of power to the state is irreversible. The option is not open to us to change our minds, to decide that the monopoly on the exercise of force held by the state, codified in the law, is not what we wanted at all, that we would prefer to go back to a state of nature."

Liberation

"...Growing detachment from the world is of course the experience of many writers as they grow older, grow cooler or colder. The texture of their prose becomes thinner, their treatment of character and action more schematic. The syndrome is usually ascribed to a waning of creative power; it is not doubt connected with the attenuation of physical powers, above all the power of desire.

Yet from the inside the same development may bear a quite different interpretation: as a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks.

The classic case is that of Tolstoy. No one is more alive to the real world than the young Leo Tolstoy, the Tolstoy of War and Peace. After War and Peace, if we follow the standard account, Tolstoy entered upon a long decline into didacticism that culminated in the aridity of the late short fiction.

Yet to the older Tolstoy the evolution must have seemed quite different. Far from declining, he must have felt, he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to appearances, enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engaged his soul: how to live."

Page 193. 'Diary of a Bad Year' by J.M.Coetzee [Nobel Prize, 2003]