Without Lifting A Finger

"O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight—to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret—as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her.... Pass the bottle.

 On the basis of the poems he has heard on the radio and nothing else, he knows Brodsky, knows him through and through. That is what poetry is capable of. Poetry is truth. But of him in London Brodsky can know nothing. How to tell the frozen man he is with him, by his side, day by day?  Joseph Brodsky, Ingeborg Bachmann, Zbigniew Herbert: from lone rafts tossed on the dark seas of Europe they release their words into the air, and along the airwaves the words speed to his room, the words of the poets of his time, telling him of what poetry can be and therefore of what he can be, filling him with joy that he inhabits the same earth as they. ‘Signal heard in London – please continue to transmit’: that is the message he would send them if he could.

 ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion,’ says Eliot in words he has copied into his diary. ‘Poetry is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality.’ Then as a bitter afterthought Eliot adds: ‘But only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’

From Youth : She has issued no reproofs, made no demands; she has even paid the abortionist herself. In fact, she has taught him a lesson in how to behave. As for him, he has emerged ignominiously, he cannot deny it. What help he has given her has been fainthearted and, worse, incompetent. He prays she will never tell the story to anyone.  His thoughts keep going to what was destroyed inside her – that pod of flesh, that rubbery manikin. He sees the little creature flushed down the toilet at the Woodstock house, tumbled through the maze of sewers, tossed out at last into the shallows, blinking in the sudden sun, struggling against the waves that will carry it out into the bay. He did not want it to live and now he does not want it to die. Yet even if he were to run down to the beach, find it, save it from the sea, what would he do with it? Bring it home, keep it warm in cotton wool, try to get it to grow? How can he who is still a child bring up a child?  He is out of his dept...

Even roadsigns. Hard to say. Youth has this in common with Summertime : the story of Coetzee's young Coetzee is largely told via the love affairs collected (stumbled onto) along the way. Given the times ('60s), the boredom of working at IBM (and wanting something more, other), the isolation that comes with being a foreigner, and the protagonist's credo: I don't believe in God, but I believe in love (maybe Coetzee states it more eloquently; maybe it's a little more complicated than that) -- perhaps it all makes sense. An excerpt: What of the woman who is to be his fate? Is her shadow already stored in his inner darkness? How much longer before she reveals herself? When she does, will he be prepared?      What the answer is he cannot say. But if he can meet her as an equal, her, the Destined One, then their lovemaking will be unexampled, that he is sure of, an ecstasy bordering on death; and when he returns to li...