Internal reconstruction

Alone in my room with my duties behind me and the lamp steadily burning I creak into rhythms that are my own, stumble over rocks of words that I have never heard on another tongue. I create myself in the words that create me, I who living among the downcast have never beheld myself in the equal regard of another's eye, have never held another in the equal regard of mine. While I am free to be I, nothing is impossible. In the cloister of my room I am the mad hag I am destined to be.

In the heart of the country, J. M. Coetzee