“I have never felt myself to be another man’s creature (here they come, how sweet the closing plangencies), I have uttered my life in my own voice throughout (what a consolation that is), I have chosen at every moment my own destiny, which is to die here in the petrified garden, behind locked gates, near my father’s bones, in a space echoing with hymns I could have written but did not because (I thought) it was too easy.”
from Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country.
again: because it is on my desk and there are so many things to say and I am so tired; too tired to say them all. So here is this cautionary tale-in-a-sentence instead. If I can write one sentence someday this dense, this evocative, this telling—it might be enough.
[also: I am not sad, but this book is on my desk and I think there are no happy sentences in it. We’ll just have to take it as a reminder about praising this mutilated world: you must, even in another’s voice, even in some other destiny, even if it is too easy, praise the mutilated world.]
