J. M. Coetzee
South African and Australian writer and scholar (born 1940)
The numbers
2 + 5 = 7
Lo Shu grid
Missing: 3, 6, 8. Present digits repeat to show how many times they occur.
Life path 7 — The Seeker
Seven is the analyst and the mystic at once — the tradition assigns it both, and does not treat that as a contradiction. It is read as the number of depth, solitude and the refusal to accept a surface explanation. Its difficulty is distance: the withdrawal that makes the thinking possible is read as coldness by everyone outside it, and 7 is described as being misunderstood more often than it is disliked.
Complete lines
Line of Reason
A complete line in the grid.
Line of Resolve
The 1-5-9 diagonal complete. Read as determination that survives the middle of a project, when the initial energy has gone and the result is not yet visible.
Cooperation
A complete line in the grid.
What is missing
Missing 3
Read as difficulty getting the inner picture out — the thought is complete, the expression lags. Often described in people whose written voice is far stronger than their spoken one.
Missing 6
Read as a complicated relationship with obligation — either avoiding it or over-shouldering it, rarely a settled middle.
Missing 8
Read as discomfort with power and money — not incapacity, but an unwillingness to claim authority openly.
Vedic — Ank Jyotish
Moolank 9 comes from the day of the month alone; Bhagyank 7 from the whole date. They differ, which is the ordinary case — the two numbers answer different questions.
Mangal
Mars. Force, conflict, courage, blood. Read as energy that must be aimed at something.
Bhagyank uses the same arithmetic as the Western life path, so the two will always agree. That is not two traditions confirming each other — it is one calculation under two names.
In their words
Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.
It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from 'the wise man's mouth' but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.
In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. (It has always struck me as strange, by the way, that Alfred Nobel did not institute a philosophy prize, or for that matter that he instituted a physics prize but not a mathematics prize, to say nothing of a music prize - music is, after all, more universal than literature, which is bound to a particular language.) The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.
To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. … It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of?
The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of self-exploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections, and setting these out in grammatical sentences ("I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences," says Murnane, whose views on grammar are firm, even pedantic.)
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