…There has been something new and uncomfortable about the way I live in my country…the concerned South African citizen, I’m thinking, sometimes requires what the poet John Keats called “negative capability”: the ability to sustain paradoxes, to live in uncertainty “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”…
…Coetzee said a while ago that leaving a country is like the break-up of a marriage…
…After a pause, he adds, “if we find that Newcastle is an idyllic place, we would sell up. But even then I think we would be coming back. Because the one thing that doesn’t change in this country is the sheer beauty of it”. Why always this word? I’m wondering. Why do so many emigrants, in the months before they leave, keep referring to this aspect of the country? One answer- the best answer I can come up with when I think about it later- may be that beauty implies an uncontaminated connection. You can talk wistfully about the landscape of your birth precisely because of its immutability: it isn’t man-made, it’s pure and inanimate, it’s the element in your identity that was there before you and the element that will remain when you’re gone…
Kevin Bloom, Ways of Staying, Portobello Books