A second track took me from Nama and Malay deeper into the syntax of exotic languages, on forays that ramified further and further as I found (I was rediscovering the wheel now) that the term primitive meant nothing, that every one of the 700 tongues of Borneo was as coherent and complex and intractable to analysis as English. I read Noam Chomsky and Jerrold Katz and the new universal grammarians and reached the point of asking myself: If a latter-day ark were ever commissioned to take the best that mankind has to offer and make a fresh start on the farther planets, if it ever came to that, might we not leave Shakespeare's plays and Beethoven's quartets behind to make room for the last speaker of Dyirbal, even though that last speaker might be a fat old woman who scratched herself and smelled bad? It seemed an odd position for a student of English, the greatest imperial language of them all, to be falling into. It was a doubly odd position for someone with literary ambitions, albeit of the vaguest—ambitions to speak one day, somehow, in his own voice—to discover him self suspecting that languages spoke people or at the very least spoke through them. ("Remembering Texas", Doubling the Point)

 It is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again "invisibly." We are the bees of the invisible . . . And this activity is curiously supported and urged on by the even more rapid fading away of so much of the visible that will no longer be replaced. Even for our grandparents a "house," a "well," a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life . . . A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers . . . Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things

Illusionism is, of course, a word I use for what is usually called realism. The most accomplished illusionism yields the most convincing realist effects. Anti-illusionism— displaying the tricks you are using instead of hiding them— is a common ploy of postmodernism. But in the end there is only so much mileage to be got out of the ploy. Anti-illusionism is, I suspect, only a marking of time, a phase of recuperation, in the history of the novel. The question is, what next? (Doubling the Point)

It is true, I wrote nothing of substance before I was thirty. I am not sure this was wholly a bad thing. How many men in their twenties write novels worth reading? But of course I did not see it like that, at the time. I did not say to myself, "Wait, you are not yet thirty ..." On the contrary, as I remember those days, it was with a continual feeling of self-betrayal that I did not write. Was it paralysis? Paralysis is not quite the word. It was more like nausea: the nausea of facing the empty page, the nausea of writing without conviction, without desire. I think I knew what beginning would be like, and balked at it. I knew that once I had truly begun, I would have to go through with the thing to the end. Like an execution: one cannot walk away, leaving the victim dangling at the end of a rope, kicking and choking, still alive. One has to go all the way. (I could have used a metaphor of birth, I realize, but let it stand as it is.) (Doubling the Point)

As eminently constructed and produced objects, works of art, including literary ones, point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just life.

[I]in Coetzee, the question of history becomes a question of living in historical culture; instead of being the ambivalent medium of a reaction to historical givens, fiction has become an arena in which historical discourse and fictionality begin to compete for authority. (introduction to Doubling the Point)

The steel faithfully taught me the correspondence between the spirit and the body: thus feeble emotions, it seemed to me, corresponded to flaccid muscles, sentimentality to a sagging stomach, and overimpressionability to an oversensitive, white skin. Bulging muscles, a taut stomach, and a tough skin, I reasoned, would correspond respectively to an intrepid fighting spirit, the power of dispassionate intellectual judgement, and a robust disposition.

 Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality. [...] But of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. [...] What happens [to the poet] is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Later, the chief character seemed to himself to be standing in a corner of a walled garden beside the hospital of two storeys, except that the plants and the pathways were those that he had seen whenever he had visited as a child the stone house where his father’s unmarried siblings lived with their parents. From beneath a certain bush in an opposite corner of the garden, some or another small creature seemed to be signalling to him. What he saw was a series of tiny flashes, and yet afterwards he used the word winking to describe the sight. He understood, in the way that he seemed to understand certain matters in his dreams, that the creature under the bush was one of a sort of beetle that had infested the garden around the stone house mentioned above. He had learned from his father’s sisters to call the beetles soldier beetles. He admired the beetles’ wing-cases, which were dark-brown with orange-yellow markings, but after he had heard from his aunts that the beetles damaged many of the plants in their garden he killed any beetle that he saw and afterwards earned praise from his aunts when he told them how many he had killed. The beetles were easy to kill, especially the many pairs that moved less nimbly because they were joined rear-to-rear. These he sought out so as to boost his tally. He did not learn until some years later that the joined pairs had been copulating. For as long as he saw the signals that he later described as winking, the chief character understood that the sender of the signals shared with him certain secret knowledge although he, the chief character, could not have said what this knowledge consisted of; for as long as he saw the signals mentioned, the chief character understood also that the sender of the signals was well disposed towards him; and soon after he had first observed the signals, the chief character understood further that the sender of the signals was God—not a symbol of God or a manifestation of God but the almighty being that he, the chief character, had addressed in his prayers during earlier years and had tried often to see in his mind. God was no more and no less than an image of a beetle with orange-yellow markings on a dark-brown wing-case in an image-corner of an image-garden in his, the chief character’s, mind.

For as long as he lay in the upper room, the chief character was in a light-hearted mood. Having found himself in the presence of God, the chief character directed towards God the sort of wordless message that he seemed able to send in his dreams. The content of the message was that there should be no hard feelings between God and the chief character. The flashing or winking from the wing-case of the Beetle-god then ceased. The chief character could no longer make out the orange-yellow markings or any other details in the shade beneath the bush. He understood that he had been politely dismissed; that nothing needed to be discussed between God and himself; that he ought to leave God to attend to his own affairs while he, the chief character, went on trying to write poetry or prose fiction. (Barley Patch)

[F]or Europeans and Americans, one order and only one is possible; it used to be called Rome, and now it is called Western Culture. To be a Nazi (to play the energetic barbarian, Viking, Tartar, sixteenth-century conquistador, gaucho, or Indian) is, after all, mentally and morally impossible. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules. ("A Comment on August 23, 1944")