South African writer (1923–2014)
Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African Jewish novelist and writer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature and 1974 Booker Prize.*, recognized as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".[1]
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women — a new job, a new town, a divorce — which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal, or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves.
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There were other gadgets, noticed about the settlement, she privately recognized as belonging to her: a small garden knife-grinder that had been in the mine house kitchen before her own, a pair of scissors in the form of a stork with blades for beak that she actually saw in July's hand when he reproached the old woman for trimming his baby's toenails with a razor blade. These things were once hers, back there; he must have filched them long ago. What else, over the years? Yet he was perfectly honest. When he was cleaning the floor, and found a cent rolled there, he would put it on Bam's bedside table. They had never locked anything, not even their liquor cupboard. If she had not happened - by what chance in a million, by what slow certain grind between the past and its retribution - to be here now, she would never have missed these things:so honesty is how much you know about anybody, that's all.
The young man outside. But he is not part of the unreality; he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places. [...] The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring. Pouring, pouring. She sat there, sick. A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp. She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself.
She sat there not wanting to move or speak, or to look at anything even; so that the mood should be associated with nothing, no object, word, or sight that might recur and so recall the feeling again….Smuts blew in grittily, settled on her hands. Her back remained at exactly the same angle, turned against the young man sitting with his hands drooping between his sprawled legs, and the lion, fallen on its side in the corner.
The train had cast the station like a skin. It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer.
Politics affects and is evolved endlessly through future generations - the way people are going to live, the way they think, further. She had no illusions about politics; about her part in it. People kill each other and the future looks back and asks, What for? We can see, from here, what the end would have been, anyway. And then they turn to kill each other for some other reason whose resolution could have been foreseen. Yet there’s purpose in the attempt to break the cycle? On the premise that the resolution is going to be justice? - even if it is renamed empowerment.