Nobel Prize Day: Vocabulary from the Wisdom and Work of Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014)

Nadine Gordimer died on July 13, 2014 at the age of 90. A novelist and activist, Gordimer wrote powerfully about South Africa during Apartheid and after, about what had changed, and what still had yet to change. In books such as Burger's Daughter, July's People, and The Conservationist, she painted portraits of characters who transcended the simple characterization of good or evil. Hers were visions of complex human beings caught up in the mechanism of society. For her achievements she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

As can be seen from these 15 quotes below, Gordimer was a voice like no other, slaughtering sacred cows left and right and capable of crafting a written sentence or an interview sound bite that makes you rethink your entire perspective on an issue.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. indifferent
    marked by a lack of interest
    The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.
  2. puritan
    someone who adheres to strict religious principles
    “Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.”
  3. utopia
    ideally perfect state
    If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
  4. heretical
    departing from accepted beliefs or standards
    Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
  5. abstraction
    the process of formulating general concepts
    The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
  6. archaic
    so extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period
    There are many proven explanations for natural phenomena now; and there are new questions of being arising out of some of the answers. For this reason, the genre of myth has never been entirely abandoned, although we are inclined to think of it as archaic.
  7. inextricable
    incapable of being disentangled or untied
    It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.
  8. ineffable
    defying expression or description
    It is in this sense, this inextricable, ineffable participation, that writing is always and at once an exploration of self and of the world; of individual and collective being.
  9. flambeau
    a flaming torch (such as are used in processions at night)
    Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
  10. sincerity
    the quality of being open and truthful
    Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.
  11. gullibility
    tendency to believe too readily and to be easily deceived
    ...with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.
  12. radiance
    an attractive combination of good health and happiness
    At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky.
  13. subconscious
    just below the level of awareness
    If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.
  14. ecosystem
    organisms interacting with their physical environment
    ...nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology... Where to begin to understand what we've only got a computerspeak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins.
  15. continuity
    uninterrupted connection or union
    If you live in Europe ... things change ... but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.
Created on Mon Jul 14 10:19:05 EDT 2014 (updated Mon Jul 14 15:51:39 EDT 2014)

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