Without Lifting A Finger

 Rereading the trilogy. Bought them as a set on Kindle: "Scenes from Provincial Life." From "Boyhood": Though he goes to the bioscope every Saturday afternoon, films no longer have the hold on him that they used to have in Cape Town, where he had nightmares of being crushed under elevators or falling from cliffs like the heroes of the serials. He does not see why Errol Flynn, who looks just the same whether he is playing Robin Hood or Ali Baba, is supposed to be a great actor. He is tired of horseback chases, which are all the same. The Three Stooges have begun to seem silly. And it is hard to believe in Tarzan when the man who plays Tarzan keeps changing. The only film that makes an impression on him is one in which Ingrid Bergman gets into a train carriage that is infected with smallpox and dies. Ingrid Bergman is his mother’s favourite actress. Is life like that: could his mother die at any moment just by failing to read a sign in a window?

Boyhood ends with Aunt Annie's death and funeral. She was the aunt who had made it her life's mission to sell/distribute her father's eccentric book Ewige Genesing (Eternal Healing) . The close is something of an edict from self to self. The young Coetzee has taken it upon himself to remember things no one else will. An impetus for writing? He alone is left to do the thinking. How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?

At what point does Coetzee become a vegetarian? I can't say. He is eating meat at the farm in the Karoo (mutton with gravy), loves to hunt, but even as a child he seems to have some Tolstoyan moments.    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 the 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.

Re reading material: I had to make a decision: With the clock ticking down (I have to report back to school on 8/12, the kids start 8/15), what do I read: more Coetzee or Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity (my Kindle was lost/stolen in Europa)? I chose the easier read, Boyhood (I'm already on p. 65 of 166), and will begin Beware of Pity next. As those two books are my only "new" reads, I'll have to resort to "rereads" (don't worry I've lots of good stuff: perhaps I'll try to dig up Tolstoy's What Men Live By or some vintage Max Frisch) until I replace my Kindle (perhaps on my not-so-far-away birthday in September). * Re the naughty Afrikaans words Coetzee mentions in Boyhood (most of which are not explained: they are just given as examples of how filthy young boys can be): Just for fun I'll first see what Google Translate says, then, if that doesn't make sense, I'll Google around for a better answer: 1.) fok seems to sp...

Can't totally explain the progression of thought (mental gymnastics) that led me to, reminded me of, these debates (which I've never heard or read in toto): prejudice = what we take for granted (Heidegger), the legacy of Socrates = Ventriloquism (Coetzee's Age of Iron ), what "coloured" means in the milieu in which a young Coetzee (or the subject/object of the narrator's gaze in Coetzee's Boyhood ) grows up: . . . Coloured, which means that he has no money, lives in an obscure hovel, goes hungry; it means that if his mother were to call out 'Boy!' and wave, as she is quite capable of doing, this boy would have to stop in his tracks and come and do whatever she might tell him (carry her shopping basket, for instance), and at the end of it get a tickey in his cupped hands and be grateful for it. And if he were angry with his mother afterwards, she would simply smile and say, 'But they are used to it!'  * Anyway, found this debate transcri...