Waiting for the Barbarians

     What do ruins teach us?  They show us how far we have advanced but they also remind us how little has changed.  The laws of nature exact and infringe upon that which was in the past as evenly as they do on that which currently exist.  The laws of civilization/society however, are the result of a subjective value that acts upon our judgments as to right and wrong.  They are founded than on approximate grounds.   Foundations which are shifting, unstable and unreliable.

     In Waiting for the Barbarians  Coetzee is working even more deeply in his signature opaqueness.  Regardless, the perplexing and vague alignments and shifts spell themselves out against a incredibly, almost invisible, simplicity.

     The ruins that the magistrate uncovers are a source of relativism that is a larger theme throughout the book.  They stand as the tangible result of satisfying basic human needs, needs that super cede culture or class but are paradoxically vulnerable to it.  Though the collective mass of the structures is, "…visible even from the town walls."(p. 16) the excavation heightens their delicacy making them dissolve, "…to nothing as soon as it was touched…"(p. 16) The idea of safety, hunger, companionship precede the broad and austere descriptions that Coetzee uses to define and contrast that which is within the Empire and that which is without.  The distinctions based on steel and technology never drown out the relationship of human to earth, of our inflexible connection to a primordial longing, that if traced far enough back or forward leads to an extinction.  This imminency is then actively resisted by an arrogance ruled by relativistic though pattern constructed solely on logic, reason and principle.  All of which are artificial products of "civilized" perceptions.   As we watch the magistrate travel, both externally and internally, between these two separate spheres that extinction is spelled out:

The children never doubt that the great old trees in whose shade they play will stand

                forever…What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water…like

                children?  It is the fault of the Empire!  Empire has created the time of history.  Empire

                has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the

                seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall…Empire dooms itself to live in history

                and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies …Empire: how not to end,

                how not to die, how to prolong its era. (p. 154)

The full circle the magistrate eventually traverses essentially leaves us off where we began.  It is like the tree or the ruins that the desert swallowed.  They are engulfed not to be destroyed but to be harbored so when they resurface once again they act as a reminder and harbinger, a measure of far and little in the same proximity.  It is also like the Empire, which is cursed by the very subjectivity it composed that will renew itself continuously as well.  

     What is engendered by nature will always be a product of violence and tranquility that is beyond the ownership of any people/society.  These things subvert and undermine notions of value but that does not make them either better or worst than anything else.  They simply just exist.  So the relativist train of thought, though inevitable, is inevitably insolvent because, "The space about us here is merely space , no meaner or grander than the space above the shacks and tenements and temples and offices of the capital.  Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same." (P 18)