“One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.”
“To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”
It's one of those books that plants a seed, J.M. Coatzee's Waiting for the Barbarians certainly affected me when I read it in a literature class, but it was the disquiet that it planted deep in me that had me reaching for it again when I began to need to address more directly the distortions caused by my own privilege.