J. M. Coetzee

The new men of Empire are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble.

I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them.

Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten.

There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars.

Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets.

We have been here more than a hundred years, we have reclaimed land from the desert and built irrigation works and planted fields and built solid homes and put a wall around our town, but they still think of us as visitors, transients.

This is not the scene I dreamed of. 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.

How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman’s body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!

I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish.

It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain.

I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men.”

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, I was opposed to civilization...