Читать книгу The Snow Sleeper - Marlene van Niekerk - Страница 5

Honourable Rector, Dean, dear colleagues, friends and family,

What does one teach, when one is a teacher of Creative Writing? Is one concerned with the true, the good, the beautiful? With criticism or fantasy or faith? What is the use of literature, its place on the greater canvas of human endeavour? And maybe I should ask: Can a story offer consolation?

I do not pretend to have answers. What I want to share with you tonight is an experience which made this kind of question irrelevant to me. It concerns a correspondence I had with a student – I shall call him Kasper Olwagen – or rather one he had with me, as I never engaged.

Perhaps, I thought, this whole episode would become clearer to me if I reconstructed the sequence of my student’s unusual letters and my reactions to them; even more so if I did this before a critical audience.

The sand is running through the hourglass; judge for yourselves. I present the evidence.

The first piece to arrive in my postbox from Kasper was a letter, if you can call it that. Sixty-seven pages. Let me read you the first paragraphs, to give you an idea of what I was dealing with.