Coetzee/Nabokov & Shakespeare

Now the thrill, of engaging with Humbert's "remorse" for stealing a childhood—cruelty satisfied by proxy—can barely be enjoyed. Too much is happening. It has been happening for too long. And most of us, especially those who have the sensibility for reading, are exhausted. Yet we keep asking: how did this happen? The world is cruel; we know that. But when we press the button, to fall out, into Beauty and imagination, we find ourselves unable to focus. We press again, being raised on Otherness, and on the value of stepping outside ourselves, expect change, but find ourselves in the same hole. Why? Why do our higher values fail us now? When the Magistrate confessed that, "once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering," we took him to mean life in the borderland. But Empire creates borderlands; they are the same. And we have been living in a borderland, off to the side, happily left alone, comforted by our status. We often fail to see that our sensibilities have been enabled by Empire. But we have been lying to ourselves. We are not different than them; we are just weaker. All this time, our hovering above others has been paid for by the Other. Your humanities degree was paid for by the people you symbolically defend (even if you still struggle to pay your college debt). And now is the time of dumb monsters, as Virginia Giuffe found out. Monsters who want to own everything, overcome nothing, who clearly live outside us and want to rule us, if they don't already. For the people who are uglier than you and I, we fail to register as human—we are not their Other. We, the people, who speak well, who know taste, who live for Beauty, who carry Nabokov to the beach—to them, we are subhuman.Why? Because we do nothing for them. You can call them Evil, but that is a mistake. Remember your Nietzsche. That ship has sailed. Guilting will not work (even if it still works on us). Playing Humbert is not Being Humbert. Something has changed and is changing; no shame will be found in the aftermath. The hole is now the center. Something is coming and it feels like cruelty. Like being squashed by a foot. Or left to slip under waves. It can only be the same sinking feeling that David Lurie felt, watching the good times go, the days free and easy when assuming the form of Byron was the highest value of every Don Quixote. Our jobs, our homes, our futures beyond a day—where are they going? To the people who know how to fight. To the people we look down on. We face diminishing life, one where the opportunity to casually sublimate our petty drives for violence with a book at the beach is no longer available. One where we might even be moved to the borderlands, lost to the margins, even from the richest country in the world. Even from our center in liberal humanism. So, let Lurie shovel his dogs—he must live out his sentence. We can only learn from Iago, who never apologized for wanting what he wanted, or doing what he did (he had his reasons—you will too), and had the intemperate honor to justify his guilt, and then shut his mouth.