"...The question is, what does God want from you, besides being very sorry? Have you any ideas, Mr Lurie?'
Though distracted by Isaac's back-and-forth, he tries to pick his words carefully. 'Normally I would say', he says, 'that after a certain age one is too old to learn lessons. One can only be punished and punished. But perhaps that is not true, not always. I wait to see. As for God, I am not a believer, so I will have to translate what you call God and God's wishes into my own terms. In my own terms, I am being punished for what happened between myself and you daughter. I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being. Is it enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term?
'I don't know, Mr Lurie. Normally I would say, don't ask me, ask God. But since you don't pray, you have no way to ask God. So God must find his own means of telling you. Why do you think you are here, Mr Lurie?'
He is silent..."
"...Well, now he has become a dog-man: a dog undertaker; a dog psychopomp; a harijan.
Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world. One could for instance work longer hours at the clinic. One could try to persuade the children at the dump not to fill their bodies with poisons. Even sitting down more purposefully with the Byron libretto might, at a pinch, be construed as a service to mankind.
But there are other people to do these things - the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. That is what he is becoming: stupid, daft, wrongheaded."
- Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
