Class Discussion on Doris Lessing's 
The Memoirs of a Survivor


Today's Excerpt


Behind the wall I found a room that was tall, not very large, and I think
six-sided. there was no furniture in it, only a rough trestle around two
of the sides. On the floor was spread a carpet, but it was a carpet
without its life: it had a design, an intricate one, but the colours had
an imminent existence, a potential, no more. There had been a fair or a
market here, and this had left a quantity of rags, dress materials, scraps
of Eastern embroideries of the kind that have tiny mirrors buttonhole
stitched into them, old clothes -- everything in that line you can think
of. some people were standing about the room. At first it seemed that they
were doing nothing at all; they looked idle and undecided. Then one of
them detached a piece of material from the jumble on the trestles, and
bent to match it with the carpet -- behold, the pattern answered that part
of the carpet. This piece was laid exactly on the design and brought it to
life.

It was like a child's game, giant-sized; only it was not a game; it was
serious, important not only to the people actually engaged in this work,
but to everyone. Then another person bent with a piece chosen from the
multicoloured heap on the trestles, bent, matched, and straightened again
to gaze down. There they stood, about a dozen people, quite silent,
turning their eyes from the patterns of the carpet to the tangle of stuffs
and back again. A recognition, the quick move, a smile of pleasure or of
relief, a congratulatory glance from one of the others -- there was no
competition here, only the soberest and most loving co-operation. I
entered the room; I stood on the carpet looking down as they did at its
incompleteness, pattern without colour, except where the pieces had
already been laid in a match, so that parts of the carpet had a bleak
gleam, like one that has been bleached, and other parts glowed up,
fulfilled, perfect. I, too, sought for fragments of materials that could
bring life to the carpet, and did in fact find one, and bent down to match
and fit, before some pressure moved me on again. I realized that
everywhere around, in all the other rooms, were people who would in their
turn drift in here, see this central activity, find their matching piece
-- would lay it down, and drift off again to other tasks. I left that tall
room whose ceiling vanished upwards into dark where I thought I saw the
shine of a star, a room whose lower part was in a bright light that
enclosed the silent concentrated figures like stage-lighting. I left them
and moved on. The room disappeared. I could not find it when I turned my
head to see it again, so as to mark where it was. But I knew it was there
waiting; I knew it had not disappeared, and the work in it continued, must
continue, would go on always.


The woman sees incredible detail in her surroundings. How might this
affect her actions outside of the house?

How can the work on the carpet act as a metaphor for this society?

What insight into the minds of the people populating this society
does the detail in the description of the fabric scraps reveal?