John Maxwell Coetzee cytaty

strona 2

„To nie dzięki mowie człowiek jest człowiekiem, tylko dzięki mowie innych ludzi.”

„Stań na pierwszym planie. Żyj jak bohater. Bądź główną postacią. Bo inaczej po co nam to życie?”

„Kiedy śni nam się, że śnimy, chwila przebudzenia jest bliska.”

„(…) w przytłaczającym milczeniu, które jest głównym elementem naszego wspólnego obcowania, niepodobna, by nie czuła, jak mój uporczywy wzrok kładzie się na niej ciężarem całego mojego ciała.”

„Życie to nie wymiana not dyplomatycznych. Au contraire, życie to dramat, życie to akcja, akcja i pasja!”

„Może to dobrze robi człowiekowi, jeśli od czasu do czasu upadnie. Byle tylko nie potłukł się na kawałki.”

„Pewne sprawy są chyba bezpowrotnie stracone. Może to właśnie świadczy o realności czasu minionego.”

„(…) ten obcy, który siebie nazywa mną, czasem rozbija lustro i mówi do mnie. Mówi przeze mnie. Mówi dzisiaj. Teraz. Mówi o miłości.”

„Niektórzy ludzie nie są stworzeni do zabawy.”

„Czy lubię zwierzęta? Jadam je, więc widać je lubię, a przynajmniej niektóre ich części.”

„Co gorsza, jego ponure nastroje i dąsy coraz bardziej jej ciążą: sam to czuje. Gdyby miał choć trochę rozumu natychmiast zakończyłby ten układ i by się ulotnił. Ale nie kończy. Caroline może i nie jest tą tajemniczą, ciemnooką ukochaną, dla której przyjechał do Europy; może sobie być zwyczajną dziewczyną z Kapsztadu o przeszłości równie pospolitej, jak jego własna, ale on chwilowo nie ma nikogo prócz niej…”

„Czyż muzyka i rozmowa nie przypominają miłości? Kto się poważy twierdzić, iż między kochankami dochodzi do jakowejś namacalnej wymiany (myślę tu o miłości cielesnej, nie o rozmowie), ale w istocie czegoś nie wymieniają, nie ofiarują sobie wzajem, po czym odchodzą odświeżeni, na chwilę uleczeni z samotności?”

„Czy w świecie przypadku istnieje jakieś „lepiej” i „gorzej”? Poddajemy się uściskowi nieznajomego lub oddajemy falom; na mgnienie oka czujność nasza przygasa; zasypiamy; a przebudziwszy się, widzimy, że oto życie utraciło kierunek. Czymże są owe okamgnienia, przed którymi chroni nas jeno wieczne i nieludzkie czuwanie? Czy nie szparami i szczelinami, kędy w życiu naszym przemawia inny głos, inne głosy? Jakim prawem zatykamy uszy?”

„„Czuć coś” to może nie to samo, co „kochać”, ale przynajmniej pokrewna emocja.”

„Nic nie popada w zapomnienie (…). Nic, co zapomniałem, nie jest warte zapamiętania.”

„W sumie Londyn ciężko go doświadcza. John ma już skromniejsze ambicje niż przedtem – znacznie skromniejsze. Londyńczycy początkowo rozczarowali go ubóstwem swoich ambicji. A teraz bliski jest tego, żeby do nich dołączyć. Dzień w dzień miasto doświadcza go i karze, a on, jak bity pies, stopniowo się uczy…”

„Niewinna ofiara może znać zło jedynie pod postacią cierpienia. To, czego nie odczuwa zbrodniarz, to jego zbrodnia. To, czego nie odczuwa niewinna ofiara, to jej własna niewinność.”

„Pytam siebie: Cóż takiego siedzi we mnie, co mnie zwabia do zakazanych sypialni i każe popełniać zakazane czyny? Czy całe życie na pustyni, uwikłane w ten lej z czarnej materii, skręciło mnie w taki zwój nienawistnej energii, że byle domokrążny handlarz albo daleki kuzyn przybyły w odwiedziny ma się spodziewać trucizny w jedzeniu bądź ciosu toporem, kiedy leży w łóżku? Czy życie sprowadzone do swoich podstaw wypala w ludziach wszystko prócz stanów najprostszych? Czystego gniewu, czystej żarłoczności, czystego lenistwa.”

„To świat słów stwarza świat rzeczy.”

„W pewnym wieku człowiek robi się po prostu nieapetyczny. I tyle. Trzeba zakasać rękawy i jakoś przeżyć resztę życia. Odsiedzieć wyrok.”

„Począwszy od pewnego wieku, wszystkie romanse są poważne. Tak samo jak zawały.”

„Zdaje sobie sprawę z brzydkiego wyrazu mojej twarzy, wyrazu drapieżnego, który mają ludzie przyłapani w momencie spółkowania.”

„Monolog mojego „ja” to słowny labirynt, z którego się nie wydostanę, póki ktoś nie pokaże mi jak.”

„Być dobrym człowiekiem. Niezłe postanowienie w mrocznych czasach.”

„Pewnego dnia zapytałam Kruzo, czy na jego wyspie obowiązują jakieś prawa, a jeśli tak, to jakie; czy też może woli się stosować do wewnętrznych nakazów ufając, iż własne serce poprowadzi go ścieżką prawości. Tak mi odrzekł:
– Prawa ustanawia się w jednym tylko celu: ażeby trzymać nas w karbach, skoro w naszych żądzach tracimy umiar. Dopóki pożądamy wstrzemięźliwie, niepotrzebne nam prawa.”

„Oboje jesteśmy szkaradni, starzy i szkaradni. Wciąż pragniemy trzymać w objęciach całe piękno świata. To pragnienie nigdy nie słabnie. Ale całe piękno świata nie chce nas znać.”

„Im mniej istotnych różnic dzieli dwa obozy, tym zajadlej się one nienawidzą.”

„Historia nabiera życia dopiero wtedy, gdy stwarzamy dla niej miejsce we własnej świadomości; nikt nie ma prawa obarczać takim brzemieniem żadnego wolnego człowieka.”

“At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode — he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which — catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended.”

“Talking to Petrus is like punching a bag of sand.
'Are you giving him up?'
'Yes, I am giving him up.”

“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.”

“Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and the desperate. Around them, guards in olive green uniforms prance with demonic energy and glee, cattle prods and billy-clubs at the ready. They touch the prisoners with the prods and the prisoners leap; they wrestle prisoners to the ground and shove the clubs up their anuses and the prisoners go into spasms. In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs.
One day it will be done, though not by me. It may even be a hit in London and Berlin and New York. It will have absolutely no effect on the people it targets, who could not care less what ballet audiences think of them.”

“If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.”

“A dictum [Beckett] quotes from his favourite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don’t invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power.”

“Paul here is unhappy because unhappiness is second nature to him but more particularly because he has not the faintest idea of how to bring about his heart's desire. And I am unhappy because nothing is happening. Four people in four corners, moping, like tramps in Beckett, and myself in the middle, wasting time, being wasted by time.”

“What he dreads is that, during a lull in the conversation, someone will come up with what he calls The Question—“What led you, Mrs. Costello, to become a vegetarian?”—and that she will then get on her high horse and produce what he and Norma call The Plutarch Response. … The response in question comes from Plutarch's moral essays. His mother has it by heart; he can reproduce it only imperfectly. “You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, am astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds.” Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet; after that, there is no knowing what will happen.”

“The people who lived in the countryside around Treblinka—Poles, for the most part—said that they did not know what was going on in the camp; said that, while in a general way they might have guessed what was going on, they did not know for sure; said that, while in a sense they might have known, in another sense they did not know, could not afford to know, for their own sake.”

“It was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies.”

“Hitherto he has found in Western music, in Bach above all, everything he needs. Now he encounters something that is not in Bach, though there are intimations of it: a joyous yielding of the reasoning, comprehending mind to the dance of the fingers. He hunts through record shops, and in one of them finds an LP of a sitar player named Ustad Vilayat Khan, with his brother — a younger brother, to judge from the picture — on a veena, and an unnamed tabla player. He does not have a gramophone of this own, but he is able to listen to the first ten minutes in the shop. It is all there: the hovering exploration of tone-sequences, the quivering emotion, the ecstatic rushes. He cannot believe his good fortune. A new continent and all for a mere nine shillings! He takes the record back to his room, packs it away between sleeves of cardboard till the day he will able to listen to it again.”

“But truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love.”

“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.”

“It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.”

“Light in tone, the novel [Murphy] is Beckett’s response to the therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world’s terms.”

“Do any of us believe in what we are doing here? I doubt it. Her NCO husband least of all. We are given an old racetrack and a quantity of barbed wire and told to effect a change in men's souls. Not being experts on the soul but assuming cautiously that it has some connection with the body, we set our captives to doing pushups and marching back and forth.”

“The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections, and setting these out in grammatical sentences (“I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences,” says Murnane, whose views on grammar are firm, even pedantic.)”

“Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?”

““It's been such a short visit, I haven't had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.”
She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. “A better explanation,” she says, “is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.”
“What is it you can't say?”
“It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, ‘Yes, it's nice, isn't it? Polish-Jewish skin it's made of, we find that's best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.’ And then I go to the bathroom and the soap-wrapper says, ‘Treblinka— 100% human stearate.’ Am I dreaming, I say to myself?””

“I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched.”

“Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.”

“[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.”

“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?”

“As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of war. An unbearing, unborn creature.”

“Why does love, even such love as he claims to practise, need the spectacle of beauty to bring it to life? What, in the abstract, do shapely legs have to do with love, or for that matter with desire? Or is that just the nature of nature, about which one does not ask questions?”

“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.”