The Writer themself knows that the only revolution is the permanent one not in the Trotskyite sense, but in the sense of the imagination, in which no understanding is ever completed, but must keep breaking up and re-forming in different combinations if it is to spread and meet the terrible questions of human existence. What alienates the Writer from the State is that the State - any State - is always certain it is right. - Nadine Gordimer, Writing As Being