Don't think twice, s'aight.

My friend Peter gave me a copy of Telling Times, a book of collected non-fiction by Nadine Godimer. He pointed me, specifically, to the essay “Questions Journalists Don’t Ask.”

Godimer asks herself fourteen questions she was never asked in interviews, and then answers them.

Even though I disagree with her about virtually everything (she thinks, for example, that specific prizes should not be given to female writers, gay writers or black writers, since prizes are not awarded to straight, white male writers), she’s got some enjoyable answers.

These are my favorites.

Q: You were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature at the hands of the King of Sweden. Do you look back on that as the best moment in your life?

A: Best moment? Reinhold Cassirer and I had just married, and were at a party in London. He had gone to find a friend in an adjoining room. I found myself standing beside a woman I didn’t know, both of us amiably drinks in hand. He appeared in the doorway. She turned aside to me and exclaimed excitedly, ‘Who’s that divine man?’ I said: ‘My husband.’

Q: Do you think people will still be reading books — printed on paper, bound — in the future?

A: No. I think a hundred years or less from now, the image of words projected on screens of limitless kinds and flowing directly as sound into ears — even beyond what technological means exist at present — will have made the book like a stone tablet dug up by archeologists. I’m shudderingly relieved to know I won’t be around to be so deprived.