Pain is nothing, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. Biut of course he is wrong.
J.M. CoetzeeIf there were a way of putting an end to himself by some purely mental act he would put an end to himself at once, without further ado. His mind is full of stories of people who bring about their end - who methodically pay bills, write goodbye notes, burn old love letters, label keys, and then, once everything is in order, don their Sunday best and swallow down pills they have hoarded for the occasion and settle themselves on their neatly made beds and compose features for oblivion. Heroes all of them, unsung, unlauded. I am resolved not to be of any trouble.
J.M. Coetzee... but what do slow and fast matter any more?
J.M. CoetzeeIf he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.
J.M. CoetzeePhotographs is not the same as just name, is more living. Otherwise, why save photographs? (Marijana to Mr Rayment)
J.M. CoetzeeUnimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.
J.M. CoetzeeHe would never want to diminish that event, that blow. It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before , only greyer and drearier. Enough to drive one to drink.
J.M. CoetzeeBut 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.
J.M. CoetzeeIt’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.
J.M. CoetzeeThe secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.
J.M. CoetzeeTags: happiness
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