The writer is of service to humankind
only insofar as the writer uses the
word even against his or her own
loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it
is revealed, to hold somewhere in its
complexity filaments of the cord of
truth, able to be bound together, here
and there, in art: trusts the state of
being to yield somewhere
fragmentary phrases of truth, which is
the final word of words, never
changed by our stumbling efforts to
spell it out and write it down, never
changed by lies, by semantic
sophistry, by the dirtying of the word
for the purposes of racism, sexism,
prejudice, domination, the glorification
of destruction, the curses and the
praise-songs.
only insofar as the writer uses the
word even against his or her own
loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it
is revealed, to hold somewhere in its
complexity filaments of the cord of
truth, able to be bound together, here
and there, in art: trusts the state of
being to yield somewhere
fragmentary phrases of truth, which is
the final word of words, never
changed by our stumbling efforts to
spell it out and write it down, never
changed by lies, by semantic
sophistry, by the dirtying of the word
for the purposes of racism, sexism,
prejudice, domination, the glorification
of destruction, the curses and the
praise-songs.
Nadine Gordimer
R-KV-R-Y, a Quarterly 2006
R-KV-R-Y, a Quarterly 2006