From "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating."

 

Some quotes:

"As warm blooded creatures, or homeotherms, we humans have to maintain a constant body temperature, but my cold-blooded poikilotherm snail's temperature matched that of its changing environment."

"While we humans have five senses, relying most heavily on vision to find our way, a snail relies almost entirely on just three senses: smell, taste and touch, with smell being the most critical. My snail could not hear anything at all; it lived in a world of silence. Its 'sight' was highly limited -- just a general awaeness of dark and light to help with orientation."

"In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing animal species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size and the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snail and worms create soil, and blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time."

"I thought of the terrarium's limited space and how the nsail had seemed content as it ate, explored and fulfilled a life cycle. This gave me hope that perhaps I, too, could still fulfil dreams, even if they were changed dreams."

"A last look at the stars and then to sleep. Lots to do at whatever pace I can go. I must remember the snail. Always remember the snail."

Tess, a note again

Such an emotional book. Got me all teary at times. The heroine could learn from Salka Valka one wishes. To be a heroine. To be stronger when she has been weak and you so much wish she were better guided, or the hero would have a bit more sense, and an expansive mind. Anyhow lots of emotional reactions to the book. It is so much of life happening to people rather than people happening to themselves. A lot of tragic drama. A lot of decisions which have impacts beyond the immediately perceptible future. Choice of the author - for the kind of story he wishes to tell, it is his chosen angle. Perhaps not the best thing to look for a heroine where the drama is more about circumstance or how human being is a subject of circumstances. Although her stoicism and fortitude is exemplary and inspirational at times. Loved reading it, even though a lot to argue with the author.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Very engaging book. Difficult to put down. One of a few such that I finish in one long afternoon.

War torn countries, lives, refugees. It is emotional but what perhaps breaks the heart more is the people drifting apart. There is life and reality which is involuntary, one finds oneself in, and one deals the best possible way with. But then there’s the voluntary bits, which we all face and given our egos, our perception of life – I don’t know, there’s no good or bad, right or wrong between people, but there are moments of grace, of courage, of generosity, which ideally, need to be reacted to gracefully, courageously and generously, by meeting them like that, fully, if we are lucky perhaps. Sometimes one can’t see beyond the intensity of the emotional moment. Sometimes, one is too small for the moment. But the wish and prayer is that may we all find our best selves for moments which need the best selves.

The book makes you want to read it again immediately almost...I get affected more by the people, their story than their common lot.

*


I don't know how great literature treats this.

Only the depth of time, the distance allows us to meet the greatness in any writing. Layers removed from that world and age, accepting everything from the author, more fully participating in the writer's world, perhaps less judgemental, with less contemporary baggage of our own, we come to the time honoured in a different way. My gripe is less with the book, but with all contemporary literature, where people and relationships reflect reality, which is less than ideal. Perhaps in contemporary fiction, however great they may be, the current times cannot appreicate it well enough, it is a privilege of later, removed ages.

What literature allows is instances or characters that somehow transcend the shallow bounds of their moment or their selves. Somehow they become larger than life while very much remaining of life. That perhaps speaks of my personal preference in literature that inspires me, elevates me, enriches my spirit. Perhaps that is what I crave from any good book. A spirit made whole. Choices made generously.


*

Personally, the drift in the novel got me emotionally high strung...anyhow. It is what it is. Overall, a strange push and pull with the book.

*

The book doesn't  name the country of our protagonists. It is a war-torn country, poor, itself a shelter to refugees. But when life becomes unliveable under militant rule, they escape. They escape through a door, into a better world. A world where they try to make their home, moving from Mykonos, to London to Miren. But as refugees they face the wrath,  befuddlement, at times kindness and understanding of natives, who do not really understand how to deal with them. In one sentence somewhere he says, nativity is relative. Especially in America. It is just a matter of time, and sometimes generations born anew in a new country forget the past movement across continents, the migration. 

*

On a factual note, if one carefully looks at the demographics of the world, where the population has grown, where it is declining, there'll be a discernible shape of poor to rich countries. A country being poor is perhaps never the only problem, the problem is mismanaged poor countries, with religious strife and people's basic freedom on line. In such a world, Mohsin Hamid's book is very topical. What perhaps European countries feel in terms of refugee crisis, until development comes to poor nations, a search for better life will keep leading people to migrate to better destinies.

*

It is a very vivid book. Keep thinking of the characters even later in your day too. Almost as if people you know from somewhere. A little bit of magic realism or perhaps euphemism in describing the doors, and peppered with unrelated stories of refugees around the world... it is a beautiful book. The emotional tug makes you want to put it aside, but the very tug makes you want to keep reading it. It is written well, with high economy.

I haven't read any other of his books but the topic is not something I would often pick up...I am generally wary of modern contemporary books, but sometimes I do pick them up. And perhaps they are the best way to understand the modern world, to complement the facts with stories of lives lived, characters known... I am not a big consumer of news, but books like this bring the world alive in front of your eyes in all its good, bad and ugly.

 
 

Essays by Lydia Davis

This is another book open on my desk. The best books are those that don't allow you to continue too long on their pages in one sitting but keep sending you again and again to blank page to discuss, explore, think yourself better, or write, or note, or quote. Hers is one such book. Instead of reading it in order, I begin reading 'Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits', and it sends me here. To note, to observe, to explore.

On a separate note, I am trying to commit myself to read 500 essays in a 1000 days. The problem with any such numeric goals is that they are not cut and dried like that. Sometimes an essay from a book makes you want to read the whole book. And then counting all those essays is not the point. You count one or two that are on the aspiration list, but the idea is to read far and wide with 500. So anyhow, I am still in the throes of committing, and the AI helps with wonderful lists culled especially for me given my interests. Lets see how far we go.

I am keen to count this essay by Lydia Davis as one entry. It is worth a reread, and then found again and again amidst busy or quiet years, it again pumps new energy in you. And as one grows out of youth and into middle ages, one values highly whatever that can pump new energy and vitality in you.

Here's to finding good books that:
- send you out of their pages to a blank page to explore and expand and note and quote
- pump you with new energy and vitality.

:)

Tess of the d’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

In the recent times, this is my second Thomas Hardy. Far From the Madding Crowd was the other one, after finishing which I didn't want to open another book with new characters, wanted it to go on and on. So with Tess at the moment. Although like a novel it keeps moving forward, but some passages need you to linger, to stay a bit longer with them. Noting them here. 

Sometimes the whole philosophy to life is encapsulated in a few passages and one can just read them again and again and be fortified to face life with a new found energy.

 

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.

*

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the fields this week for the first time during many months. After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the thought of the world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to them—“Ah, she makes herself unhappy.” If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be this idea to them—“Ah, she bears it very well.” Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

Whatever Tess’s reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then. This was why she had borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her arms.

Beginning again

After a good start, this blog has languished for the last couple of months. I have been collecting notes in my scrapbook, and this year, on my old reading blog, I am noting down a paragraph on books I finish. So I've kept some notes. But the main issue is books I finish is a small number compared to the books I open. And I would like to keep a note of those encounters, what they set forward in my head, the thoughts they ruffle or ripple or bring to the fore. 

So hoping to begin here, again.

The Possibility of an Island

By Michel Houellebecq

"The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact that it is possible to make him happy; he demands such simple things, his ego is so limited. Possibly, in a previous era, women found themselves in a comparable situation—similar to that of domestic animals. Undoubtedly there used to be a form of demotic happiness, connected to the functioning of the whole, which we are no longer able to understand; there was undoubtedly the pleasure of constituting a functional organism, one that was adequate, conceived with the purpose of accomplishing a discrete series of tasks—and these tasks, through repetition, constituted a discrete series of days."

"I don’t mean that my sketches were unfunny; they were funny. I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality: we had simplified and pruned so much, broken so many barriers, taboos, misplaced hopes, and false aspirations; truly, there was so little left." 

Started reading this one. My first Houellebecq. 

As I read through, it taps on one of my ongoing thoughts -- if one were to be born somewhere, anywhere in the world as anyone, is this world a happy place? Where I wonder about a few hundred miles west from say, where I was born, the Muslim Arab being female in such places, to even the modern west and if you read Houellebecq. I am glad happy and grateful for what I am and where I am with all my pros and cons and good and bad and nice and nasty. The world one would like -- one hopes that it balances for a being between one’s world view and circumstances of one’s life. That there is an inherent teleological balance which is not visible to an outsider. That one makes do with one’s life and that statement I utter about myself perhaps most human beings can utter about themselves... one can only wonder. 

The only thing in the Michel H novels is the sense of sadness, lostness, unhappiness with life. When all is revealed and no mystery left. One then feels grateful for this universe that even if on earth, we seem to find ourselves out of sync with existential questions and somehow erased wonders about humanity, an ennui, regarding the universe and our existence, we are still in a sacred mystery. May it never be revealed. May the bubble of existence keep floating till one lives, as Borges says, time and space like mirror when lit. 

only life is real.
Space and time are its shapes,
the mind's magical modes,
and when life burns out,
space, time, and death go out with it,
as when light fails
the image in the mirror fails,

One of my other overarching thoughts is about consumption economy and man being a mimetic creature, now seems to have copied those short term values, a consumption, use and throw approach to life and its relations too. Perhaps there is the source of our unhappiness. When we consume, use and throw we satisfy the shallow parts of our selves. But when we commit, irrespective, a sort of lifelong avowal to certain few things or relations, then somehow we are able to access deeper parts of us which a use and throw world cannot reach. Somehow life grows to the circumstances it finds itself in. And by constantly giving it the short term easy outs, one just lives on surface, surrounded by the consumption driven images of modern world. Even a little deeper is satisfaction, peace, tranquility and somehow a dissolution of existential questions, as if there’s no need, as if one finds oneself in the fountain, the sacred fount which is all answers. 

Strange paradox of life and living. Words too are surface. Words though at times open doors, but one needs to walk through. It is in the living, the being and the becoming.

"Tradition and the Individual Talent", an essay by TS Eliot

Something to be read in its entirety, often. It inspires one to slowly gain that historical sense, that Eliot refers to. It inspires one to read great poetry and see it all again in the way the writer suggests.

Leaving some excerpts here, more as notes to self, to visit and revisit often.

*

Apart from the historical sense, it is also about the surrender of personality to the larger metaphysics of poetry as a medium. There's a purity thus, a poem becomes something different from a poet, an expression of the historical sense, the place in time, and the concentration of emotions thus far in the poet expressed or rather, allowed to be expressed impersonally. The impersonality lends a purity which links it back to the metaphysical aspects of consciousness itself, and a poet as a receptacle or a catalyst, a medium to pass on newly what the present moment with its historical sense wishes to express, yet, yet, free of the poet as a person.

The essay can be found here.

*

Some excerpts:

Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.

Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.

What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst.

It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

Art in Nature by Tove Jansson

A collection of short stories. The beginning part (perhaps first half), is full of light, breathing, beautiful collection of stories. Poignant sketches of art and artists, and the making of art. Really enjoyed 'The Doll's House'. But then one story caught me the wrong way (The Locomotive) and I had to abandon the collection for a while. Some of the stories in the collection are quite sad. It is a mixed bag eventually, but still, enjoyed the different perspectives, different lives it presented. Each story is very different from another.

Following from a sketch about a cartoonist:

"As Stein worked on Blubby, Allington grew more and more real to him. Allington not coming up with ideas and staring down at the street through the grey window panes, Allington brewing tea and rooting around in his drawers, answering the phone or completely forgotten between deadlines, Allington famous and worn out. Did he feel lonely, or was he wary of people? Did he work better in the mornings or later when the paper was quiet? What did he do when he got stuck, or did he work at a steady pace for twenty years? Now I need to be careful, Sam Stein thought. I mustn’t romanticize him."

Following from the wonderful story, The Doll's House, where a retired wood-worker begins on an intricate project at home, which takes over his waking hours, his living space, his attention, his ambition, everything, and yet, the story has a charm of its own:

"Alexander was in the grip of a passion for perfection. He was not aware of how closely, how perilously, perfectionism and fanaticism are related."

One of the other really short story, A sense of time, is poignant. It leaves you wondering about reality, about what you've just read, about what is truth.

"Grandmother’s private, interior world must be very strong if she can so serenely deny the sun and the moon. I wonder what it is that shines for her and makes her so terribly certain and calm."

I read this after reading VW's Monday or Tuesday, and very few books can be compared to that. 

Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

A collection of short stories. Prose poems. Sketches of consciousness as it moves through the world, sometimes in music, sometimes in colours, sometimes slowed to a snail in a garden bed, and sometimes, as rapid as the flight of a heron. At all times, this closely followed, breathless conscious chatter in the mind poetically recorded, the rough sketchbook of human thought, mind and being.

The whole of the book needs to be excerpted, or perhaps to be read again and again. I had to read the stories twice or more at times to get a working appreciation of where the author wishes us to go with her. But such rich rewards of language, thought, perception, sensibility! Delight and joy.

In one of the stories, to make good books and good people. In another, after a person goes through a series of social chatter,

"If the mind’s shot through by such little arrows, and—for human society compels it—no sooner is one launched than another presses forward; if this engenders heat and in addition they’ve turned on the electric light; if saying one thing does, in so many cases, leave behind it a need to improve and revise, stirring besides regrets, pleasures, vanities, and desires—if it’s all the facts I mean, and the hats, the fur boas, the gentlemen’s swallow-tail coats, and pearl tie-pins that come to the surface—what chance is there?"

Excerpts do little. One has to read her over and over. Perhaps the way I ask myself to read a little bit of poetry or prose by poets every now and then, so goes for the trio of Woolf, Joyce and Proust. A little bit of one of those every now and then, if not for anything, just as a close meditation in the act of being conscious, being a being. If poetry is about the human and language and existence and meaning and nothing and about becoming, these artists of consicousness are about the being. So a little bit of both needs to be woven through all the rest of the reading. 

And Quiet Flows The Don by Mikhail Sholokhov

What is regarded as usual and normal lends so much weight to one's experiences. Given the relativity of our being and our living, the norms of the times can sometimes lighten the load of some of the heaviest of weights. And conversely, or rather, perversely, comfortable times can make heavy of some of the lightest of loads. Such is human life. And literature of a different time and place is perhaps our chance to see this mirror or this perspective so well laid out. For instance, just a commonplace sentence - the person limped, having lost some of the functioning in a horse related mishap. And it was such a by the way fact about him. But in modern fiction, perhaps it would become a defining fact. The scale and weight itself shifts with external shared comforts and discomforts. In times of wars, a living for basics, during times of relatively less clutter, but perhaps a general cloud of mishaps, the weight of the limp is felt differently when every other person has been impacted by a war compared to times of beauty magazines, where an average looking person can spend time thinking themselves something less than what in other times wouldn't even raise a brow. Even as I write this, I realize that one is never well-placed to say these things, one has only one's own lived experience. But still, it is something about the norms and the private weight that makes the load light or heavy. 

What can one take away from it? Ideally, to keep moving forward as all these things are extrinsic, beyond one's control. One is born in a time and place and that is one's given. One begins from there, and lives and regards life. Perhaps the only takeaway is that when there is so much relativity there's little objectivity to one's experience, and hence experience itself is malleable to the light it is seen in. To regard it with that simplicity, and to keep moving forward irrespective of where life finds you.

When everyone around you goes through the same fate, however drastic it seems, there's a comfort of sharing. While if one carries a load alone, however little it may be, it begins to feel very difficult - all this in comparison. And hence this need of detachment perhaps or non-attachment as Gita says. One has to keep moving forward, to the next best action irrespective of what life lays on and around you. 

*

Still in the first few pages of the book. (early Jan)

Rock, Paper, Scissors by Maxim Osipov

A collection of stories. Been on my wishlist for a few years now. Delighted to open it and begin reading it.

And for all of us who have grown up in provinces, be in Russia, or in India or perhaps anywhere in the world, this foreword is a warm introduction to the book. As well as a philosophy of life. Read for restoring of balance, or restoring of perspective.

The Foreword in its entirety:

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

In the past I have read My Antonia by Willa Cather. I enjoy some of these books, like Independent People, Hunter's notebook sketches, Jean Giono's books, The Tree of Man, Far from the Madding Crowd. Some of these books where the world is at the cusp before the modern consumeriasation and capitalism. When man was still struggling to eke out a living from land, and life's standards and meanings were quite simple and not as cluttered with things and short-term consumption patterns as they are now in this modern age. There is a serenity in these books.

This one is a short book, and shifts forward episodically once early in the book. So even before you get to know and warm up to the different characters, they have moved forward in time and sensibility. (midway in the book atm). Still the core characters are the same, and the book slowly warms you up to them amidst a shifting background cast of people.

Later - loving the book very much. Given its shortness, its compactness, it is not like long novels, and yet the sharply described characters. Glad to be reading it. A recommend. 

Also, Marie is one of a memorable characters in the book. So full of life, so whole-hearted, she inspires you.

*

There's this underlying discussion in the book - as modern time approaches, and the element of optionality creeps in (work the land or be free of it, and work an occupation?), a similar debate as following reigns in many minds, an excerpt:

*

Carl paused. Alexandra pushed her hair back from her brow with a puzzled, thoughtful gesture. “You see,” he went on calmly, “measured by your standards here, I’m a failure. I couldn’t buy even one of your cornfields. I’ve enjoyed a great many things, but I’ve got nothing to show for it all.”

“But you show for it yourself, Carl. I’d rather have had your freedom than my land.”

Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.” 

Alexandra was silent. She sat looking at the silver spot the moon made on the surface of the pond down in the pasture. He knew that she understood what he meant. At last she said slowly, “And yet I would rather have Emil grow up like that than like his two brothers. We pay a high rent, too, though we pay differently. We grow hard and heavy here. We don’t move lightly and easily as you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I wouldn’t feel that it was much worthwhile to work. No, I would rather have Emil like you than like them. I felt that as soon as you came.”

“I wonder why you feel like that?” Carl mused.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over, and she didn’t see the use of it. After she had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she’s come back she’s been perfectly cheerful, and she says she’s contented to live and work in a world that’s so big and interesting. She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it’s what goes on in the world that reconciles me.”

* 

Perhaps this debate can be stretched to modern times too. And to a deeper level of being too,. But more one thinks, more one realises that contentment and tranquility is within. It is the management of internal expectations with world and reality that one finds serenity in. Every way of being has an alternate, and every point of view too. Eventually the negotiation is with the self, and the expectations one carries from life.  

But without sounding sermon-like, a note to self about being free wherever one is. To be free from own past and the past ways of being. Just freshly assessing wherever one is, and taking the best step/action forward. To keep beginning again and again, wherever one is. 

Here's to fresh beginnings, often. And here's to 2026. Happy New Year!

Essays in the Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson

Keen to read more from him given my enjoyment of the 'Travels with a Donkey..', I downloaded this inviting book.

Yet to read through, but first reading the essay, "The Books which have influenced me". This essay inspires one to read better, read well. The influence is good and much welcome as the time for new year resolutions approaches. So far the way it has worked on me, I have filled up ibooks with lots of Shakespeare, Whitman, and some old classics. Hope to read a lot from these over the coming year. 

Some excerpts:

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.  They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn.  They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.  To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction.  But the course of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters.

A book which has been very influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived: the Essais of Montaigne.

But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. 

that this old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their contemporaries.

come next to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues.  But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.  I will be very frank—I believe it is so with all good books except, perhaps, fiction.

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer. 

Goethe’s Life, by Lewes. 

Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of man’s nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. 

This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book—the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.  The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself. 

Such are the best teachers; a dogma learned is only a new error—the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession.  These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they communicate.

Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson

A charming, delightful read. Picked it up in one of the book reccos somewhere and then found it at a second-hand book sale. Opened it yesterday. Just a third in so far. But love the country that comes alive with his writing. If one were to learn to write how to make scenery come alive, perhaps one can begin by copying some of his sentences.

I haven't read anything else from him. Except perhaps abridged versions of Treasure Island and Kidnapped ages ago. After reading this though, keen to pick up more from him. Or at least read the full versions of these novels.

"Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?"

A description of a Trappist monastery which he visits:

"He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries, Hebrew Bibles, and the Waverley Novels.  Thence he led me to the cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the brothers’ gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his religious name upon a board—names full of legendary suavity and interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the Odes et Ballades, if you please, and even Molière, to say nothing of innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians.  Thence my good Irishman took me round the workshops, where brothers bake bread, and make cartwheels, and take photographs; where one superintends a collection of curiosities, and another a gallery of rabbits.  For in a Trappist monastery each monk has an occupation of his own choice, apart from his religious duties and the general labours of the house.  Each must sing in the choir, if he has a voice and ear, and join in the haymaking if he has a hand to stir; but in his private hours, although he must be occupied, he may be occupied on what he likes.  Thus I was told that one brother was engaged with literature; while Father Apollinaris busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot employs himself in binding books."

"The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals a day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins somewhere in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat but once in the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon, twelve hours after they have begun the toil and vigil of the day.  Their meals are scanty, but even of these they eat sparingly; and though each is allowed a small carafe of wine, many refrain from this indulgence.  Without doubt, the most of mankind grossly overeat themselves; our meals serve not only for support, but as a hearty and natural diversion from the labour of life.  Yet, though excess may be hurtful, I should have thought this Trappist regimen defective.  And I am astonished, as I look back, at the freshness of face and cheerfulness of manner of all whom I beheld.  A happier nor a healthier company I should scarce suppose that I have ever seen. "

*

Later - Finished reading it in December itself. A lovely read. Although I do not follow the Camisards completely and the description around the same about the Catholic-Protestant issue, still, the book is worth a reread for Stevenson's language and thoughts interspersed throughout. 

Have downloaded a few of his essays and other travel writings too to stay close to the voice.

Aspirations for the new year

Some ideas/projects/ aspirations/ challenges

• To read Chekhov complete stories
• A Dickens
• A Dostoevsky (not keen on C&P, but who knows, maybe. There's Demons. Or if nothing else, can re-read the Idiot. Quite liked it.)
• To read Nehru's Glimpses of World History (a long time aspiration). And for motivation, read this blog.
• Ulysses before June 16th so that can reread some bits that day. (Big goal this one! I picked it up this year on June 16th, but the bookmark is still somewhere less than a third)
• A Woolf - Either read To The Lighthouse or read the Waves. 
• 3 Shakespeare plays (rereads ok)
• Milton's Paradise Lost. Read slowly again
• And a real challenge is to read all essays by Orwell. At least fifty found here. Not sure how this goes, but at least putting it down here.

General notes:

• To keep a similar pace as this year's
• To keep reading wide - lots of countries, lots of translation
• Poet prose reads - something every now and then.
• Malte Briggs.
• Redress of Poetry or Finders Keepers
• Poem readings, and noting down. Often.

Later, when I had sat with the above for a while. I realise I prefer to keep it simple. Hence:

• Read a lot. Whenever you can. 
• Read slowly.  :)

Anton Chekhov - The Collected Stories

A collection available here.

During the coming year, I wish to read all of Chekhov's stories available on Project Gutenberg. I have read him in different collections, some famous ones, some not so famous ones over years and decades. But this desire now to read all the stories that are available easily - from the beginning of the above collection. 

For me, reading short stories takes time. One can only read so much in a day. It is like a cup of coffee. One opens up a story, gets involved with it, and after reading it, keeps thinking about it for a while. One can only have so many cups of coffee in a day. In another analogy I often think of a book of short stories as an artist's gallery of sketches while a novel as a single painting. Even though the number of pages may be the same, it takes much longer to read a collection of short stories in terms of mindspace. 

Excited about this new project for the coming year. Plan to drop in notes here and there whenever a story makes an impression. 

*

At the moment, it is the second story, Ward No. 6. Much written about and often referred to, this story is about the mental patients ward, and their doctor and how in the way humanity works in a group, some truths which are not objective are never discovered, but rather voted or afeared. The problems of drawing attention, the closing circles where any argument either way draws the circle tighter and tighter around the self. 

But most of all that life is such a gradient. The way we live makes life look static, 1 and 0, while so much of life, nature and reality operates on gradient. Just that our flight/fight mind finds it simpler to operate while regarding the world as rigid static, while the world is anything but. Reality floats, flows, changes, while we operate as if the world stays the same forever. So goes for the sane and insane in the story... makes you wonder. 

Reminds me of the Bell Jar, and Plath's heroine's grappling of sanity and insanity. This narrow band of normalcy for the social human on one end, while on the other end is the changing, shifting human, which as long as it doesn't draw attention to its not-normal moments can be regarded as sane and normal. It is the bigger question of human way of being, while the reality resides in the zones of becoming, ever-changing, ever-fluid.

*

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

Not my usual pick or read. I got into this book at my pen-pal's recco, and glad that I picked it up. Its been a while that I had regular correspondence with my pen friend, but on one of the reconnecting mails, this recco showed up as one of her recent reads. 

It charts its course from Spain before world war, but during its own civil war, the impact of one family, refugees out of Spain, settling into Chile, building their lives there, and then facing Chile's own dicator crisis. Although it is a novel, it draws from real life and facts and one of the historical characters is Pablo Neruda. Through the life story of Dalmau family, it gives a close account of how life, world and reality were affected by the civil war in Spain (perhaps now I can read Orwell's essay on Spain and find my bearings better), and then just how refuge to another country works, how the people rebuild their lives, and then like any other life, the ups and downs, joys and sorrows, a life well lived even though lived through tumultous times and places. 

A Long Petal of the Sea, is another name for Chile, drawn from one of Neruda's poems. 

Interesting way to approach history. It is much more contextual now to read history of both Chile and Spain during those times which the book depicts, and make sense of it, then to read it without any reference point. That is one of the upshots of reading from different times and places, one has a character reference living during those times, and one sees the world, and the history with their context.

*

Another thought - was about those professions of teaching and doctors. Not often in my life have I wondered about alternate paths. Once before while reading Che Guevara's motorcycle diaries and his youthful energy, and then again in this book, looking at Victor Dalmau, is the only time I have thought about life as a doctor. These books from South America!

Doctors and teachers - and all the related professions supporting them. These seem to have no need to retire but perhaps get better with experience. There must be other such professions as well...

*

Keen to look up more from Allende by and by. She has been writing for the last 40-45 years. I guess I enjoyed the historical context fiction - will look up more such books from her. The other such books I read this year were The Dictionary of Lost Words and Bookbinder from Jericho. Both new books but set a century ago in a different world, both drawing from some reality and hence providing an interesting vantage point for world and local history of that period.

Oh What a Paradise it Seems by John Cheever

A novella.

Long time ago I read his Collected Stories, and for a while decided not to read more from him. His writing is beautiful but the modern life, the suburbia, the lost feeling of emptiness that it generates, the stories bother you more than provide you solace. I guess that is one way of looking at a reading journey - whether the book or the reading provokes you, agitates you, troubles you or somehow provides solace, or lifts you up. Most great books lift you up - even while dealing with life's miseries, they somehow in the way great art or literature can do, still manage to elevate you, lift you up, provide you some sort of quiet peace, a tranquility in life in whichever shape or form it meets you.

One can also say that in a reading encounter, there's as much of a reader in a book while reading it as there's the writer. Or perhaps not as much, but a lot of the reader's personal landscape finds its way in the reading journey. And hence, somehow books of a different time and place which do not find obvious counterparts in a reader's particularity perhaps provide richer encounters, and hence perhaps too, most great books need that testing by time, a remove from the reader's day and age.

Back to this novella. Here again, like Cheever's other stories, the same desolation at times. The lost purity of life before suburbia, the consuming classes, the burgeoning comforts of Western lifestyle and the commercial aspects of life which encroach on, or dull the purity and simplicity of life. Along with the commercial consumption aspects of modern life, there is detritus and flotsam of  past relationships too in his modern American or America of second-half/ late twentieth century. There is a lot of clutter of modern life - both in things and consumption, and the similar mindset in ways of being with people. It leaves people empty, devoid of some simplicity, lost in the clutter. 

What is the way out? One has to think here, that again, because it is simplicity that we are talking about, it can be found almost anywhere, but needs a cleansing of mind, a resetting of expectations from life and reality. 

**

A short quick read. The book connects well with Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement. What he mentions that there is little fiction talking about what we are doing to the planet. This one is a short novel about consumerism and what we are doing to the planet, and ourselves. 

Every Day I Read by Hwang Bo-Reum

I came across the author when a friend gifted me the Hyunam Dong Bookshop. I enjoyed the simple read, and had a list of books from that one to look up or to add to reading list. 

Bought this one on a trip away. Quick read. But a really sweet read. Very accessible and friendly. Opens up reading ideas, suggestions and inspires in a very simple way. Now have a list of books and authors to look up. And excited to take up reading goals for the new year. 

The author reads around 12 books a month! For me, 2025 was one of my best reading years and I averaged somewhere at 6 a month, or perhaps a little less. But happy about that. And glad that I bought this book. Hope to dip in it again here and there when wish to up the tempo on reading intensity.