Reading Coetzee

I have been reading J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and finding it to be one of the best novels I have ever read. Coetzee's use of domestic animals as a sort of conduit for self-realization is incredible. In reading Darwin I have realized that he placed animals closer to humanity than ever before and that it must have been really strange to his contemporaries. One interesting contour of Modernity is the realization and rejection of the animal world. I mean to say that man's physical and day to day realtion to animals was quite a bit closer in the 17th and 18th centuries yet animals were seen as essentially different--with modernity this relation has been slowly reversed. We now know that we are essentially closer to animals yet their presence in our world is abstracted and tucked away, more distant than before. There is much cruelty in this distance--I do not know if it is more or less than before but I think that it must be very different. Disgrace is a hard book but clear in its language and careful in its structure--I hope some of you will read it and let me know what you think. It makes me think of friends who have left the city for the farms--I often wonder about what they are finding there. I miss them because it is clear that the work of the farm teaches many important lessons and that they will only be better people for their toil.