Waiting for the Barbarians

by J.M. Coetzee

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

I feel old and tired, I want to sleep. I sleep whenever I can nowadays and, when I wake up, wake reluctantly. Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

When I look at her naked body and my own, I find it impossible to believe that once upon a time I imagined the human form as a flower radiating out from a kernel in the loins. These bodies of hers and mine are diffuse, gaseous, centreless, at one moment spinning about a vortex here, at another curdling, thickening elsewhere; but often also flat, blank. I know what to do with her no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do with another.

Whether I appear to her decked in my robes of office or whether I stand naked before her or whether I tear open my breast for her, I am the same man.

What bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of thorns?

How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid?

It seems appropriate that a man who does not know what to do with the woman in his bed should not know what to write.

‘time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.’

man was not made to live alone!

How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles?

Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.

What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one’s bones and then one day without warning flood out.

Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.

all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

With my arm over my face I find myself drifting toward sleep. It may be true that the world as it stands is no illusion, no evil dream of a night. It may be that we wake up to it ineluctably, that we can neither forget it nor dispense with it.

Memories of his mother’s soft breast, of the tug in his hand of the first kite he ever flew, as well as of those intimate cruelties for which I abhor him, shelter in that beehive.

‘The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves,’

‘I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects.

Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.