Just As We Bemoan The Passing Away

I Must Not Fall Asleep In The Middle Of My Life. Out Of The Blankness That Surrounds Me I Must Pluck The Incident After Incident After Incident Whose Little Explosions Keep Me Going.

Deprived Of Human Intercourse, I Inevitably Overvalue The Imagination And Expect It To Make The Mundane Glow With An Aura Of Self-transcendence. Yet Why These Glorious Sunsets, I Ask Myself, If Nature Does Not Speak To Us With Tongues Of Fire.

You Think You Know What Is Just And What Is Not. I Understand. We All Think We Know." I Had No Doubt, Myself, Then, That At Each Moment Each One Of Us, Man, Woman, Child, Perhaps Even The Poor Old Horse Turning The Mill-wheel, Knew What Was Just: All Creatures Come Into The World Bringing With Them The Memory Of Justice. "but We Live In A World Of Laws," I Said To My Poor Prisoner, "a World Of The Second-best. There Is Nothing We Can Do About That. We Are Fallen Creatures. All We Can Do Is To Uphold The Laws, All Of Us, Without Allowing The Memory Of Justice To Fade.

Censorship Is Not An Occupation That Attracts Intelligent, Subtle Minds. Censors Can And Often Have Been Outwitted. But The Game Of Slipping Aesopian Messages Past The Censor Is Ultimately A Sterile One, Diverting Writers From Their Proper Task.

He Would Not Mind Hearing Petrus's Story One Day. But Preferably Not Reduced To English. More And More He Is Convinced That English Is An Unfit Medium For The Truth Of South Africa. Stretches Of English Code Whole Sentences Long Have Thickened, Lost Their Articulations, Their Articulateness, Their Articulatedness. Like A Dinosaur Expiring And Settling In The Mud, The Language Has Stiffened. Pressed Into The Mold Of English, Petrus's Story Would Come Out Arthritic, Bygone"(117).