Disgrace

by J.M. Coetzee

‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’?

They are not going to lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. That’s the example that people like Bev try to set.

I was a servant of Eros: that is what he wants to say, but does he have the effrontery? It was a god who acted through me. What vanity! Yet not a lie, not entirely.

‘It was a male. Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn’t know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide.’

The day is not dead yet but living. War, atrocity: every word with which one tries to wrap up this day, the day swallows down its black throat.

If the country can pass judgment on the city, then the city can pass judgment on the country too.

You are a man, you ought to know: does one speak to one’s father like that? Are she and he on the same side?