organic time

The weekend disappeared in a flash. There were too many all nighters to count, and family started asking, when are you coming back!

When all is said and done, will there be someone at the end? I am sure our accomplishments will speak of us proudly to anyone who will listen, but what of ourselves? The hunger for companionship smolder beneath, out of sight, but always felt.

literary person number three

JM Coetzee

I saw Mr. Coetzee five years ago, also at the Victoria Literary Festival. It is not fair to alter his person by the imprecise aging of memories, but I felt very strongly about him when I left that conference hall all those years ago.

At the University of Oregon, JM Coetzee's work, Waiting for the Barbarians, along with Anne Charter's wonderful anthology of short fiction, revived my mind from the devestation of dropping out of school. I approached him with curiosity, and a healthy bit of reverence for anyone who could handle the unfair events arising from his homeland.

Of course, he is now one of the Nobel Laureates, and the only modern literature laureate that I have read. My studies tend towards the dead, and I am intimate with the works of Hemmingway, Camus, Beckett, and Sartre (who refused the Nobel prize awarded to him), but never got around to the living.

When he walked into that crowded conference room, he was introduced as "coo-tze-ah". He read an incredibly boring section of prose in monotone. And he walked off stage. We never saw him after the show.

Nowadays, I don't fault literary persons for wanting to escape the public eye, since their jobs were done months, or years before the public would even hear of the title, with writing being such a secretive endeavour. However, at the time, I thought the worst of him.

Two years ago, I revisited his work Disgrace, and the bitter taste of that meeting still lingered. Disgrace was challenging and brave, but I couldn't help but stop and think, is this book really that good? When he won the Nobel Prize, I hesitated. Someone who writes like that won the Nobel?

As I learned more about literary analysis, and began forming my own opinions about the written texts, the memories of that meeting faded, replaced by an uncertain evaluation of his work. No, it is not like Hemmingway, nor Faulkner, nor any of the greats. But it does capture some part of the human beating in South African hearts. Maybe that's enough for it to stand among the volumes that attempt to document the lives existing on this planet.