Category: Old age of my youth – 2011

SUNDAY, 20 MARCH 2011

Imagine a Taiwanese Afrikaans writer.

Imagine hundreds of Zulu writers who express their experience of reality and their stories in Afrikaans.

How would a Brazilian writer’s essays read that were not translated into Afrikaans but originally written in Afrikaans, with the background of both Afrikaans and Brazilian culture? Or a Russian-Afrikaans author’s stories. Or the poetry of a Filipino-Afrikaans poet.

What would the short stories look like of an Afrikaans writer who grew up in Afghanistan, in southern India, or in Sri Lanka?

Afrikaans novelists from Lagos, Kinshasa, Istanbul, or Buenos Aires?

What about Afrikaans-Vietnamese film directors, sculptors, graphic artists?

Afrikaans-Japanese comic book artists?

Afrikaans painters from Chicago or Hyderabad or Fiji or Hong Kong or Riyadh?

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TUESDAY, 1 MARCH 2011

I look at a showerhead, and I see something whose existence has a purpose. I also know it is something that was designed with a particular purpose in mind, and manufactured to serve this purpose.

Some people believe it is logical to deduce that if there is a purpose to your existence, that you – you specifically – were designed and manufactured to certain specifications by an Invisible Force to serve this purpose.

It will be dishonest of me to create the impression that I believe so too.

Where does this leave me? One possibility is to accept that my life serves no purpose.

Suppose, however, I decide that my life has to serve some or other purpose. In that case, I can design, as far as possible, my life, even my person, for this purpose. I would have to work within available means, but is that not what the people behind the showerhead also did? I will thus for all practical purposes manufacture a life to serve a particular purpose.

My life will then eventually serve this purpose, because I decided it should be the purpose of my existence.

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