— Quotes from John M. Coetzee’s Elisabeth Costello
“In his deepest being Sultan is not interested in the banana problem. Only the experimenter’s single-minded regimentation forces him to concentrate on it. The question that truly occupies him, as it occupies the rat and the cat and every other animal trapped in the hell of the laboratory or the zoo, is: Where is home, and how do I get there?”
“However, there are still animals we hate. Rats, for instance. Rats haven’t surrendered. They fight back. They form themselves into underground units in our sewers. They aren’t winning, but they aren’t losing either. To say nothing of the insects and the microbia. They may beat us yet. They will certainly outlast us.”
“We are not meant to live thus, Sir. Flaming swords I say my Philip presses into me, swords that are not words; but they are neither flaming swords nor are they words. It is like a contagion, saying one thing always for another (like a contagion, I say: barely did I hold myself back from saying, a plague of rats, for rats are everywhere about us these days). Like a wayfarer (hold the figure in mind, I pray you), like a wayfarer I step into a mill, dark and disused, and feel of a sudden the floorboards, rotten with the wetness, give way beneath my feet and plunge me into the racing mill-waters; yet as I am that (a wayfarer in a mill) I am also not that; nor is it a contagion that comes continually upon me or a plague of rats or flaming swords, but something else. Always it is not what I say but something else. Hence the words I write above: We are not meant to live thus. Only for extreme souls may it have been intended to live thus, where words give way beneath your feet like rotting boards (like rotting boards I say again, I cannot help myself, not if I am to bring home to you my distress and my husband’s, bring home I say, where is home, where is home?).”
“All is allegory, says my Philip. Each creature is key to all other creatures. A dog sitting in a patch of sun licking itself, says he, is at one moment a dog and at the next a vessel of revelation. And perhaps he speaks the truth, perhaps in the mind of our Creator (our Creator, I say) where we whirl about as if in a millrace we interpenetrate and are inter penetrated by fellow creatures by the thousand. But how I ask you can I live with rats and dogs and beetles crawling through me day and night, drowning and gasping, scratching at me, tugging me, urging me deeper and deeper into revelation – how? We are not made for revelation, I want to cry out, nor I nor you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring into the sun.”