J. M. Coetzee
From BillionQuotes
J.M. Coetzee is a South African born author, currently living in Australia. Author of novels such as Disgrace, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.
Disgrace
Although he devoted hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings, and intentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. (p.3-4)
Isaacs has a cheap Bic pen in his hand. He runs his fingers down the shaft, inverts it, runs his fingers down the shaft, over and over, in a motion that is mechanical rather than impatient.
Youth
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.
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.
Elizabeth Costello
[Elizabeth is not sure that she believes in what she is saying. ] "she no longer believes very strongly in belief.... Belief may be no more... than a... battery which one clips into an idea to make it run."
