Nadine Gordimer

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/books/nadine-gordimer-novelist-and-apartheid-foe-dies-at-90.html

Nadine Gordimer."It was not her country’s problems that set her to writing, she said. “On the contrary,” she wrote in an essay, “it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.”

Falling through the surface of our way of life is a wonderful description, I think, of what can happen when we take on a tool of expression which opens us to not only ever-expanding exploration and expression, but also to new awareness of the nature and energy of life itself. Nadine Gordimer is one of those giants with class, whose mark in our literary and social-consciousness will forever ripple into our collective consciousness.