By way of beginning our conversation, let us consider, as we read Coetzee's first novel, a few statements and phrases from Czeslaw Milosz...
-
I was against
narrowing the argument to questions of craft and thus ignoring the great
paramount theme.
- ...a sense of
the tragic, which is only born of historical experience
-
Cosmic
perspective has been completely lost, and the best image of the earth would be
of a ship on which the passengers murder each other, indifferent to the sea
surrounding them.
- ...intelligence
dissenting from “meaninglessness,” searching for meaning, grafted onto darkness
like a noble shoot onto a wild tree.
-
The new always
allies itself with the social and the political, though sometimes in a highly
in a highly roundabout way.
-
Those who
believe that the contradiction between necessity and the good can be solved on
any level other than that of mystery delude themselves.
-
But what does
poetry have in common with being right? A whole lot. The arrangement of words
implies choice, choice implies deliberation, and behind your words lurks a
silent judgment about the many human matters that you have dealt with.
-
The more harshly
we judge human life as a hopeless undertaking and the more we rid ourselves of
illusions, the closer we are to the truth, which is cruel.
