Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer

Author:Nadine Gordimer
Language: deu
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374707415
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Forever.

The receiver replaced, the laughter silenced. Adrenalin that (like that other bodily signal) hadn’t risen for so long, sinks normally. Still addressing—Thapelo or self—something slowly enters as a third voice, insistent to be heard. Follows, to the garden. And then back to the telephone; is the machine staring mute, or being gazed at, unseeing. But it’s not picked up. There are areas of thought not meant to be shared, they question certainties held in common. Neither of you could go on pursuing what you do, being what you are, without them.

Forever.

How long is forever. How old is the delta that is part of the cosmos visible from Outer Space? Astronauts report it. Will ten dams be visible, the scale of ponds, like all man-made scratchings and gougings in comparison with the planet’s own design.

Maybe we see the disaster and don’t, can’t live long enough (that is, through centuries) to see the survival solution Matter with infinite innovation has found, finds, will find, to renew its principle—life: in new forms, what we think is gone forever. In millennia, what does it count that the white rhino becomes extinct, the dinosaur’s extinct, the mastodon, the mammoth, but we have the ingenuity of the evolved design of the giraffe, the elephant with its massive hulk standing vestigially web-footed with the memory of the fish. The first fish that dragged itself out of the amniotic element.

So, what is this kind of stuff, thinking . . . Heresy, how can it come to one who when asked, And what is your line, answers, What am I, I’m a conservationist, I’m one of the new missionaries here not to save souls but to save the earth.

This heresy is born of the garden, as Evil was—like those other thoughts, to be forgotten, the garden engendered—it belongs to this state of existence that’s about to cease to be. Whatever ‘forever’ means, irrevocably lost, or surviving eternally, himself in this garden is part of the complexity, the necessity. As a spider’s web is the most fragile example of organisation, and the delta is the grandest. Return home; that’s his loop in the thread from the spider’s web to the Okavango system: Benni/Berenice, small boy, Daddy! Paul! all the waterways and shifting sand islands of contradiction: a condition of living. Like another heresy, knowledge of what it is he came from into this state of existence, and what—if he survived—he would be returned to—the relationships of that home were not what he might have had; knows that. Doubt had come to him in the garden where he had begun to apprehend life as a boy. Biodiversity; Chief, say to yourself: professional jargon stuff. But it’s within that term your place is, Chief, say it: I’m going home at the weekend. Always find the self calling on the terminology of the wilderness, so unjudgmental, to bring to circumstances the balm of calm acceptance. The inevitable grace, zest, in being a microcosm of the macrocosm’s marvel.

Doubt is part of it; the salt content.

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