Waiting for the Barbarians

by J.M. Coetzee

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt. That is what I bear away from my conversation with Colonel Joll,

how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other!

“When some men suffer unjustly,” I said to myself, “it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.”