"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 o… - J. M. Coetzee

لا أستطيع أن أعبر لك عن مدى إرهاقى.
ليس إرهاقاً يمكن علاجه بالنوم ليلة هادئة فى سرير حقيقى، الإرهاق الذى أقصده صار جزءاً منى.يشبه الصبغة التى تتسرب إلى كل ما أفعله، وكل ما أقوله، أشعر، بتعبير هوميروس، أننى مرخية الأوتار، لم تعد هناك قوة شد.
ارتخى وتر القوس الذى اعتاد أن يكون مشدوداً، صار مثل جديلة من القطن، وهذا ليس حال الجسد فقط. العقل أيضاً : مرتخ، مستعد لنوم هادئ.

She does not reply. She would rather hide her face, and he knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confidant, modern young woman. Like a stain the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners. How they put her in her place, how they showed her what a woman was for.

But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow.