Essayists From South Africa

"But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place: a great rocky hill with a flat top, rising sharply from the sea on all sides except one, dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves."

"The stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of)."

"Would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, he no longer knew for sure what truth, what fancy."

"Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering."

"At last I could row no further."

"But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate."

"Not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway by heart."

"I would rather be the author of my story than have lies told about me."

"It was I who shared Cruso's bed and closed Cruso's eyes."

"A being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso."

"To live in silence is to live like the whales."

"The less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs."

"At last I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard. With slow strokes, my long hair floating about me, like a flower of the sea, like an anemone, like a jellyfish of the kind you see in the waters of Brazil, I swam towards the strange island, for a while swimming as I had rowed, against the current, then all at once free of its grip, carried by the waves into the bay and on to the beach."

"I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves."

"I discovered out in the country ... that there is time enough for everything"

"As time passed, however, I slowly began to see the originality of the resistance you offered"

"There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars."

"Will we live to regret this blood spent so lavishly on the sand?"

"To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. … It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of?"

"In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role."

"There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas"

"Can't you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton?"

"We have been here more than a hundred years, we have reclaimed land from the desert and built irrigation works and planted fields and built solid homes and put a wall around our town, but they still think of us as visitors, transients."

"His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong"

"He could not imagine ... driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land"

"But more often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if polelaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body, and wake an hour or two later dizzy, confused, thirsty. These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, black, outside time."

"Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, I was opposed to civilization..."

"They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die"

"Day by day the wind picks at the roof and the weeds creep across the terraces."

"But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here?"

"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."

"To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades."

"When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: of being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso."

"I tell myself I talked to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will."

"It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau."

"You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we lead on Cruso’s island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day."

"“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”"

"To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force. I mean the executioner and his assistants, both great and small. If I were the Irish woman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned."

"If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain."

"But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday."

"The new wife is a lazy big boned voluptuous feline woman…"

"unused body now dusty, dry, unsavoury"

"I am… a farmgirl… not unaware that there is a hole between my legs that has never been filled."

"“I am a child,” she tells him, “Despite my years, I am an old child, a sinister old child full of stale juices. Someone should make a woman of me… , someone should make a hole in me to let the old juices run out.”"

"Coming to the farm from Worcester, where Coloured people seem to have to beg for whatever they get, he is relieved at how correct and formal relations are between his uncle and the volk. Each morning, his uncle confers with his two men about the day's tasks. He does not give them orders. Instead he proposes the tasks that need to be done, as if dealing cards on a table; his men deal their own cards too. In between, there are pauses, long, reflective silences in which nothing happens."

"The secret and sacred word that binds him to the farm is 'belong'. Out in the veld by himself he can breathe the word aloud: I belong on the farm. What he really believes but does not utter, what he keeps to himself for fear that the spell will end, is a different form of the word: I belong to the farm. He tells no one because the word is misunderstood so easily, turned so easily to its inverse: The farm belongs to me. The farm will never belong to him, he will never be more than a visitor: he accepts that."

"Sometimes when he is among the sheep — when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away — he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of their long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it — the price of being on earth, the price of being alive."

"The boy is special, Aunt Annie told his mother, and his mother in turn told him. But what kind of special? No one ever says."

"He is angry at his mother for not having normal children and making them live a normal life."

"He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help."