A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and the mind, whenever one opens the pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the women and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, or the lovely land that man cannot enjoy.  He knows only the fear of his heart.

From “Cry, the Beloved Country,” by   Alan Paton.

This powerful paragraph can only be written with the heart by someone like Alan Paton who was committed to the abolition of apartheid, to a greater cause than his own life: “Cry for the broken tribe … .Cry aloud for the man who is dead … .Cry, the beloved country …”    One can feel the accelerating rhythm that clutches the readers’ emotion and pulls them along for a ride on a roller coaster that,  instead of landing them safely on their feet,  plunges them into the life’s cruel reality-– “He knows only the fear of his heart.”