Essay: A Literary Remembrance

South African Novelist Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, died of cancer last week. The book was an early expression of the developing racial anguish in South Africa and has become an international classic. Earlier this year, had asked him to write an essay about South Africa today. Two days after | his death, Paton's widow Anne forwarded the incomplete typescript with a note: "I am very sorry he never finished it, but it was almost done, and during the last few days before he went into the hospital he was just too tired. In any case he could not bring his mind to bear on it because of his illness. He so wanted to give of his best for the article." Paton, it turns out, had written not about South Africa but about more immediate preoccupations: his sense of mortality and his love of words. What follows is Paton's essay, exactly as he left it.

I turned eighty-five in January of this year. What is it like to be eighty- five? One does perhaps feel a little pride -- quite unjustified -- in having reached such a venerable age. Apart from that, there's nothing to make a song about. Another eighty-five years would be the death of me.

Have I reached eighty-five in good shape? In reasonably good shape, yes. My sight and my hearing are not so good as they used to be. What are my complaints, if I can call them that? I think the greatest handicap for me of being eighty-five is that I have lost my surefootedness. (I am surprised that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary does not have this word, but I was reassured to find it in Webster.) I do not now feel happy walking among the coarse hummocks of a grassy hill. I do not like walking in the dark at all. When I was a young student of seventeen or eighteen, I remember crossing the Umsindusi River near Pietermaritzburg on the stepping-stones. I didn't walk, I ran. Today I would fall into the river at the first stone. I have grown very lethargic. I am writing this piece quite easily, but it has taken me a week to bring myself to do it. My creative and literary imagination will never again rise to any great height. I shall never again write such words as these:

The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away. The soil will not keep them anymore.

Nor words like these, written to "A Small Boy Who Died at Diepkloof Reformatory."

So do I commit you,

Your frail body to the waiting ground,

Your dust to the dust of the veld.

Fly home-bound soul to the great Judge-President

Who unencumbered by the pressing need

To give society protection, may pass on you

The sentence of the indeterminate compassion.

For my continuing love of the word I am indeed grateful. At my present age I can recapture almost perfectly -- perhaps totally perfectly -- the emotion I felt when I first read certain pieces. I have just read again Whitman's threnody on the death of Abraham Lincoln.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,