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. "

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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. 

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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.

The Great Derangement - Amitav Ghosh

This is the first time I’m reading him, and really loving his writing. Keen to read more from him. Erudite and literary, in a good way. Makes you slow down while reading the prose, and I am tempted to re-read certain sections, if not the whole book. The book is about Climate and the way perhaps future generations will call this age the greatly deranged age – these 300 years of industrialisation, exploitation of earth’s resources, and our persistent blind eye to what is happening to the world.

Personally, I don’t know how one breaks the tide of the way humanity has chosen progress and materialism and capitalism and the race to resources – without really building in the right price of things. Only the cost of extraction is referred to, and the cost of replacement is completely ignored. Earth regenerates, and both air and water can be regenerated if we would only help the process and actually allow the cost to be built in to the cost of things. The right price will perhaps slowly nudge us into the right habits.

Air and water being the most basic, and the only renewable resources we have - as to the rest of the extraction of earth, unless we change our value matrix, our way of living, or use our brains to develop the world on a more sustainable, long-term basis, ....what Gass says, about the human appetite, a universe is on fire...but because it is not felt acutely immediate, the brain relegates the fire as invisible...

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I have just about begun reading the book. Keen to read this one and more from him. And perhaps find a better way to talk about this book to more people. Some of these things are as much about real awareness, mindshare, thoughtshare of more and more people - both young and old. The world turns itself over fairly quickly in the timescale of history, but the impact of these few scores of generations of human beings will be felt for a while

One can only move forward from where one is, and the best way is to work with the value matrix I feel.

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Note to self - to read it well, and to write about the book.

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There are two things regarding the problem of cities close to water, the problem of climate change created by humanity, and all the related problems. Changes take generations. The first thing is about awareness, understanding and appreciation. The second thing is about using this as a checklist of problems with current world arrangements, and to fix what can be fixed or bolstered. For instance, he talks about Nuclear Power plants close to sea which are now prone to cyclones because of climate change. If efforts in science can be directed towards creating innovation and tech to deal with Nucelar Plants in case of power loss. ....What I mean is that this book is not just for awareness, but also as a reckoner of things to be fixed, the worst problems to be dealt with, the efforts to be directed...to maximise the saving of humanity, both from impact as well as cause... and saving of the environment.

One can hence also read this book as a sort of checklist. To consider all the issues he details, story by story, something as a task list.




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There are cycles in the world, of which the clock is a miniature way to look at, seconds, minutes, hours, each circling at a different pace. But in nature, umpteen cycles keep moving. Nothing is still, everything is slowly or rapidly churning. Some of these are discernible to us like seconds and minutes and some of these are in rhythm with our being like hours, days, months and years. But many of these, because they are beyond our easy discernment, sometimes are not really grasped, understood, or their magnitude and impact appreciated. One gets a feeling reading this book that so much of the world is beyond our time-sense-grasp, that where one should listen to or bow to the wisdom of ages, just because one cannot discern or see so far. So either the wisdom of the ages, or the general reverence of the ancient man to what he didn’t understand rather than the general unabashed-ness of the modern man in front of what he doesn’t understand, or a general obliviousness, ignorance, a complete disconnect or ignoring of what is not understood. The thing about unknown unknowns but there are known unknowns too. However, the pace of life, the practicality of living and at a level, it is some sort of FOMO that drives the human race so competitively, capitalistically forward.




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There's his approach to the issue, a question he wonders about why is climate change not much spoken about in fiction, and to answer that he delves into the form of narrative and novel which has evolved over time, and the seeming improbability of certain events make them difficult to approach in fiction which deals with 'life as usual', the modern day life. (Some excerpts below)

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Some excerpts:

The humans of the future will surely understand, knowing what they presumably will know about the history of their forebears on earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids are inert.

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Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition. The most important element of the word recognition thus lies in its first syllable, which harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge: a moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld. Yet this flash cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other. The knowledge that results from recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself.

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But, of course, air too can come to life with sudden and deadly violence.

But more often it does so with a quiet insistence—as the inhabitants of New Delhi and Beijing know all too well—when inflamed lungs and sinuses prove once again that there is no difference between the without and the within; between using and being used. These too are moments of recognition, in which it dawns on us that the energy that surrounds us, flowing under our feet and through wires in our walls, animating our vehicles and illuminating our rooms, is an all-encompassing presence that may have its own purposes about which we know nothing.

It was in this way that I too became aware of the urgent proximity of non-human presences, through instances of recognition that were forced upon me by my surroundings.

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But when it came to translating these perceptions into the medium of my imaginative life—into fiction, that is—I found myself confronting challenges of a wholly different order from those that I had dealt with in my earlier work. Back then, those challenges seemed to be particular to the book I was writing, The Hungry Tide; but now, many years later, at a moment when the accelerating impacts of global warming have begun to threaten the very existence of low-lying areas like the Sundarbans, it seems to me that those problems have far wider implications. I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older;


that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.


That climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena is not hard to establish.

Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.

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But the truth, as is now widely acknowledged, is that we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed—and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.

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Clearly the problem does not arise out of a lack of information: there are surely very few writers today who are oblivious to the current disturbances in climate systems the world over. Yet, it is a striking fact that when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction.

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In his seminal essay ‘The Climate of History’, Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that historians will have to revise many of their fundamental assumptions and procedures in this era of human-induced climate change, in which ‘humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth’. I would go further and add that the Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our common-sense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general.

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Culture generates desires—for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings—that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy.

When we see an advertisement that links a picture of a tropical island to the word paradise, the longings that are kindled in us have a chain of transmission that stretches back to Daniel Defoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the flight that will transport us to the island is merely an ember in that fire. When we see a green lawn that has been watered with desalinated water in Abu Dhabi or Southern California or some other environment where people had once been content to spend their water thriftily in nurturing a single vine or shrub, we are looking at an expression of a yearning that may have been midwifed by the novels of Jane Austen. The artefacts and commodities that are conjured up by these desires are, in a sense, at once expressions and concealments of the cultural matrix that brought them into being.

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This culture is, of course, intimately linked with the wider histories of imperialism and capitalism that have shaped the world. But to know this is still to know very little about the specific ways in which the matrix interacts with different modes of cultural activity: poetry, art, architecture, theatre, prose fiction, and so on. Throughout history these branches of culture have responded to war, ecological calamity and crises of many sorts: why, then, should climate change prove so peculiarly resistant to their practices?

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In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museumgoers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first, and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.

All Excerpts From Ghosh, Amitav. “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.” 

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Later - This book is a long essay. Even as I read it, I go through earlier sections. Like a report or a text book, it needs more time than a fast read. And any time spent on it is enriching in terms of understanding, appreciation and a worldview or a way of seeing fiction and the world in light of our deranged age.

Thirteen Ways of Looking - Colum McCann

Not my usual fare. But a quick read of short stories/ novella. Oft spotted in a second-hand book sale, finally bought yesterday. A fast read. Sometimes, what you need.

Intrigued by the title which is borrowed from Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen ways of looking at a backbird. Reads like a show at times. One can almost imagine a teleseries of the name. 

Another one that writes grippingly is Tobias Wolff, one of my other dips.

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Later - I finished the novella. But the rest of the stories, I just couldn't go through the final one. So this book doesn't make it to the annual list as finished.

Blogs on reading and writing

One of the most delightful things is to explore other people's thoughts on the books they like and on reading itself. And about writing and reading, and reading and writing. This has been one of the pleasures and one of the most awesome gifts of the internet. 

If I look back at myself, I, an early eighties kid, came across internet in my early teens. And from that time, when people used to create cyan-background websites, to this time, books and their blogs and their pages, and the general fan-stuff about reading has been one of the most most most amazing things about internet. Very few interests connect people this way across centuries, across time and space as shared ideas. 

Somehow thoughts about books elevate the discussion. It needs to be from somewhere deep in the person, but amazingly, it somehow is not personal that way. One of the most paradoxical things - a thought so innermost yet being able to be shared without the sticky personal aspects. And hence, one feels one knows people but one may not know the facts of their life. 

I come across many many book blogs and each one is a joy. I came across a blog a few years ago which was one of the most amazing finds on books. But it went missing...Anyhow, this note of thanks to the missing blog. Hope it exists in some form. And to many other blogs that I would have come across, saved, forgotten over time...and often pleasently returned to. 

As to my own blogs, these are mostly notes to self. I have been doing so in some form or fashion since early 2000s. I enjoy reading them after some time, and if they are about a book, they are a mirror of my thoughts at the period. This current blog is my latest on books. Here, I can be freer (and quicker) turning out random unedited notes. The important thing being noting down the joy - of all the books I am currently exploring and planning to read or reading. 

Readers/audience are appreciated :) Cheers to reading and book-blogging!

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

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There is a loneliness in being human. One is so much a social being, yet at the end of the day, one is very much alone in oneself. This loneliness also transcends to this cosmic loneliness, on this seeming scene of the universe and lone humanity. It is not about physical loneliness, it is the wavelength loneliness at times. You seem to traverse a wavelength and hope to find another soul on that wavelength. Sometimes one finds it in books, in authors, in long past writers. In that way, books are a beautiful tech to meet people on your own wavelength. 

This loneliness is not pressing. There's plenty of company and fellow feeling and shared joys and shared lives. It is about a deeper question to the universe, it is about the hungry wonder of being, the unknowables surrounding us, and in this macrocosm, a little microcosm of us, playing along, living our lives, living our days on this Earth. 

Perhaps it is a mood that envelops one. Perhaps it is the keenness to express something in words, perhaps it is about personal aspiration to be able to express well what is really on mind. 

The only solace is it all passes. The flow of life keeps moving forward. So sometimes even if you are stuck at some aspect of life, life kindly carries you forward. Between the self command of 'keep moving forward', and the nature of things that they pass, one keeps walking on virgin sands of time. New footsteps which soon get washed over. There's nothing to hold on to, nothing to show except in oneself, in one's becoming and being. And that too passes. It matters not at the end of the day however burning those questions and wonders may be. Time and life dull every sharp edge, everything gets blunted like smooth river stones in this churning river of time. 

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Little to do with the book. More to do with the idea of books and being able to sometimes either find other souls on the same wavelength as yours, or sometimes being gently led on the writer's prose to a completely new wavelength. 

There are certain writings that are meditative. One can unfold oneself on those sentences and glide along wherever the author takes you. Sometimes these might be about the most inconsequential of things, but a personal, perhaps an individual's personal and vulnerable take on things. Not seeming as such, but as such. I have been reading Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. I got nudged along to Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. And I think of Pessoa. I think of Knausgaard. I think of meditative long sentences. Even Proust and to an extent Murnane on reading and writing. For that matter, unedited prose of many writers when they talk about reading and writing. There's a sort of quiet meditative movement to the prose, which calms you down, soothes you like a baby on bottle. Not the prettiest of analogies, but words folded in a particular way can have as calming a power - in the same instance folding you warmly in the general you and I, and in the same instance letting you stand alone as a very unique I, forgetting and not forgetting, murmuring sweet nothings, almost inconsequntial things, just some words, connecting you warmly to life. 

The simple idea is reading and writing and perhaps meditative prose. Soul Mountain (still very early pages) seems like one. Perhaps there are certain moods where the mind feeds on the description of simple everyday life but at a removed context so the everyday world is itself an enchanted world. For such moods. Or perhaps it is the tranquil world view of the writer that affects us. It must be something like that, where between the lines, something of the writer's spirit, his worldview, gets transmitted to the reader. And although what one reads about maybe relatively simple, the words have done their work as a net for the spirit, for the world-view of the writer to be transmitted to you. Perhaps it is that, that we enjoy in such meditative prose. 

*

I have different reading moods. For all moods, secure, not so secure, Eastern wisdom. There's a stillness, enough-ness, a sort of simple joy in simple being without any major clamor or want or need or have not or some sort of perpetual competition that the Western world view has at times. I think of Soul Mountain. Clouds on the hill. Basho and his travels. I have read little that way, but I think Europe too finds its tranquility but mostly somehow there's melancholy and it leans towards the absurdity of life,a heaviness. But somehow when one regards life in the Eastern way which is generally about the whole, reading the Western works is like going down a level where one still grapples with parts. Just sometimes.

Even that understanding of the whole is lived, not expressed. One sees a glimmer of it in Eastern simplicity and thoughts, but like chimera it escapes in the Westernization of our lives. Still, there's hope. Hopefully at least to keep arriving at new meditative ways of understanding the world, and yet another way of seeing it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Far From the Madding Crowd

By Thomas Hardy

Apart from reading Mayor of Casterbridge in my teens, I somehow did not find my way to Thomas Hardy all these years. That book perhaps I half understood or probably very little. But on picking up Far from the Madding Crowd, I do wonder all the reading delights I have missed and perhaps can look forward to in his other books as well.

Still ongoing for me (two-thirds done), it is a joy and delight. I enjoy reading about both Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene. And although there's a lot of plot and happenings and a little drama and some sentiment, there's a lot of joy of life in the writing, and many passages need to be read again, my mental note being perhaps I need to read the book again. Gabriel Oak is an inspiration and his good sense a beacon. Bathsheba, her freedom of spirit and keenness of life, another inspiration. And Hardy's observations throughout the book, a pleasure to read and re-read. 

In a long while a book which I do not exit from or switch to other books. Only sometimes when I need breathing space. Perhaps it would have inspired a lot of drama, but I enjoy the language. Glad that I am reading it, and wondering how come haven’t heard people talk about it. But perhaps people have read all the classics long time ago. Sometimes, some passages I wish to reread the book. Like the stoicism of Gabriel Oak. Guess somewhere, there’s life advice there. All the high drama comes and goes, it passes, but his constancy, his stoicism, his cheerfulness, loyalty and sense of duty – simplicity. All that wins the day for me. Lots to absorb there. 

Somehow the books of yore have a peace and quiet in them which modern books leave one thirsty for. There's a lot of strife in modern life, and so much of it is self-made, a bit pointless seeming but perhaps never seeming pointless to the concerned parties. There's a sort of despair, dissatisfaction, incompleteness, a sense of loss, fragmentation in modern novels. But somehow the older books - may be the writers were wiser, maybe they created some wise characters, there's a sense of peace, a sense of fulness, and irrespective of the vicissitudes of life, a sense of joy in living.

**

Some excerpts from the book:

"Stupors, however, do not last for ever, and Farmer Oak recovered from his. It was as remarkable as it was characteristic that the one sentence he uttered was in thankfulness:" 

"another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise."

"Gabriel was paler now. His eyes were more meditative, and his expression was more sad. He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain."

"He drew out his flute and began to play “Jockey to the Fair” in the style of a man who had never known moment’s sorrow. Oak could pipe with Arcadian sweetness, and the sound of the well-known notes cheered his own heart as well as those of the loungers. He played on with spirit, and in half an hour had earned in pence what was a small fortune to a destitute man."

"He fancied that he had felt himself in the penumbra of a very deep sadness when touching that slight and fragile creature. But wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions, and Gabriel endeavoured to think little of this."

"He also thought of plans for fetching his few utensils and books from Norcombe. The Young Man’s Best Companion, The Farrier’s Sure Guide, The Veterinary Surgeon, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Ash’s Dictionary, and Walkingame’s Arithmetic, constituted his library; and though a limited series, it was one from which he had acquired more sound information by diligent perusal than many a man of opportunities has done from a furlong of laden shelves."

"This picture of to-day in its frame of four hundred years ago did not produce that marked contrast between ancient and modern which is implied by the contrast of date. In comparison with cities, Weatherbury was immutable. The citizen’s Then is the rustic’s Now. In London, twenty or thirty years ago are old times; in Paris ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four score years were included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a mark on its face or tone. Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase. In these nooks the busy outsider’s ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his present is futurity"

"Like Guildenstern, Oak was happy in that he was not over happy. He had no wish to converse with her: that his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their own, and containing no others in the world, was enough."

"What a way Oak had, she thought, of enduring things. Boldwood, who seemed so much deeper and higher and stronger in feeling than Gabriel, had not yet learnt, any more than she herself, the simple lesson which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave—that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be."

"In the worst attacks of trouble there appears to be always a superficial film of consciousness which is left disengaged and open to the notice of trifles,"

All Excerpts From

Hardy, Thomas. “Far from the Madding Crowd.” 

Salka Valka - Halldor Laxness

By Halldor Laxness

A world unto itself.

"It was, therefore, not easy to guess instantly what kind of foul weather would be served up next; and it might happen that one evening there was frost and clear weather, stars in a blue sky and a moon, if it was the right time by the almanack. The Creator took thought. And next day a drift wind set in, and snow fell thickly all that day and the following day as well; and then came frost, and a storm followed which collected the snow in drifts; and existence, such as it was in the place, had thus got its teeth well set in its own tail. The Creator could go on like this quite indefinitely -- how could it amuse Him?

And life in this place was like a kind of accompaniment to this absurd weather; its inhabitants went round in circles, toiling and moiling through one cycle of bad weather after another, without its leading to anything at all. They seemed to be the victims of an enchantment; they had to go far out to the sea to catch the silly fish, whenever the weather made it at all possible, cut their heads off, split them, clean and salt them, and pile them in stacks till summer. But however hard they toiled in the unending race with the weather roundabout, the result was just as invisible; everything vanished again into the sea from which it was caught, whether the men fished in partnership or for fixed wages; the accounts at Johann Bogesen's swallowed everything up. No money was ever to be seen.

The dogma "account at Johann Bogesen's" was as essentially abstract as the belief in the Revelation of Our Lord and redemption through Jesus Christ, but nevertheless its results were real and visible enough, like, let us say, the Sacraments and the means of grace; it meant continuous credit in years when there was no fish, safety even if the fishing trade was depressed, tarboard, paint, currants, cardamoms and candied lemon-peel, as well as little painted tin pails for the children at Christmas. And last but not least, this unique religion provided a guarantee against anyone having to be buried at the expense of the parish, which was regarded locally as almost the greatest scandal and abomination that could happen to a human being -- while on the other hand, to leave enough to pay for one's own funeral was regarded as a sign of true greatness and unbelmished honour, in life and death.

As soon as  one of these ruthless mornings had opened its unpitying eyes upon the penniless life of the place, Salka Valka was sent out into the snow-slush to distribute the milk, wearing waterproof cowskin shoes with hay in the toes. She had the milk portioned out in five small cans which she carried over her shoulder, three behind and two in front, and delivered at five doors of poverty-stricken appearance. The milk was debited to the seller and credited to the buyer in the accounts at Johann Bogesene's, for this was the trading system of the place. Every transaction involving as much as the value of a needle has to make a detour via the ship, where sums of five ore were deducted from Peter's account and credited to Paul's. This divine book-keeping settled everything between men and women at Oseyri on the Axlarfjord. All deals were done in elusive numbers, but every real asset in the place lay firm and fast in Johann Bogesen's hands. "

Fires - Raymond Carver

By Raymond Carver (Essays, Poems, Stories)

I really enjoy the essays collected here. I have read and reread them over the years. There are just four of them. Rest of the book is poems and stories which I browse through. I somehow cannot read his stories because of the subject matter and generally I tend to stay away from modern lives while reading fiction. It puts me in a despairing state of mind. Somehow I need the space & distance between the lives we lead and the stories we read. But his language is so sharp, so crystal, so pointed, that the essays are always a delight to read. Short, crisp, and they read as if the writer were talking directly to you.

Following little excerpt from his preface to John Gardner's book 'On becoming a novelist'. Carver titles the essay, 'John Gardner: The Writer as a Teacher'. He studies creative writing under him, and following he recalls:

"For short story writers in his class, the requirement was one story, ten to fifteen pages in length. For people who wanted to write a novel -- I think there must have been one or two of these souls -- a chapter of around twenty pages, along with an outline of the rest. The kicker was that this one short story, or the chapter of the novel, might have to be revised ten times in the course of the semester for Gardner to be satisfied with it. It was a basic tenet of his that a writer found what he wanted to say in the ongoing process of seeing what he'd said. And this seeing, or seeing more clearly, came about through revision. He believed in revision, endless revision; it was something very close to his heart and something he felt was vital for writers, at whatever stage of their development. And he never seemed to lose patience rereading a student story, even though he might have seen it in five previous incarnations."

I'll get to the stories too, eventually. But the habit of bringing everything home can leave you heartbroken at times in his stories. The sadness can be piercing. I find myself then returning or retreating to Victorian fiction. Perhaps one day someone should talk about the courage of a reader.

Loren Eiseley

Just a reminder here to read him more often, here and there, interspersed in my days, some wonder and rumination.

I have often borrowed the Library of America edition of his collected essays, read a little at a time, but at times that is plenty to restore perspective on life, and everything about it. And I have often wondered why is he not talked about more, or why didn't I hear of him until I stumbled on this book. Anyhow, here are some snippets from here and there. For me, it is not as much about finishing this book, as about dipping in again and again to refresh, renew and somehow engage with a tranquil soul which passes on its wisdom and tranquility to you.

From The Lost Notebooks:

"Walked along the edge of the daisy field. Interesting to see nature going on here at the verge of the Penn Fruit Company. Abandoned cups, match cases, whiskey bottles slowly being covered and made "natural" by red clover and diasies. How fast life flows from one form to another. The illusion of things. To the generations of cabbage butterflies I must be as everlasting as the Sphinx. I turned round sharply to make sure the Wynnewood shopping center had not disappeared while I gazed. I half expected to see a little plaster and a few bricks disappearing into the insatiable maw of the clover. Matter disappears of modfieis its appearances so fast that everything takes on an aspect of illusion -- a momentary fizzing and boiling with smoke rings, like pouring dissident chemicals into a retort. To a time-foreshortened eye all form would become bubblings or momentary imaginative shapes such as one sees when dreaming before a winter fire. One thinks one sees a shape and it is gone. Perhaps it is so with God half-asleep over the dying embers of his universe, and dreaming the shapes that come and go through the coals. "

From The Hidden Teacher:

"And war it has been indeed -- the long war of life against its inhospitable environment, a war that has lasted for perhaps three billion years. It began with strange chemicals seething under a sky lacking in oxygen; it was waged through long ages until the first green plants learned to harness the light of the nearest star, our sun. The human brain, so frail, so perishable, so full of inexhaustible dreams and hungers, burns by the power of the leaf."

 

"The student of fossil life would be forced to tell us that if we take the past into consideration the vast majority of earth's creatures -- perhaps over ninety per cent -- have vanished. Forms that flourished for a far longer time than man has existed upon earth have become either extinct or so tranformed that their descendants are scarcely recognizable. The specialized perish with the environment that created them..."

 

"The spider was a symbol of man in miniature. The wheel of the web brought the analogy home clearly. Man, too, lies at the heart of a web, a web extending through the starry reaches of sidereal space, as well as backward into the dark realm of prehistory. His great eye upon Mount Palomar looks into a distance of millions of light-years, his radio ear hears the whisper of even more remote galaxies, he peers through the electron microscope upon the minute particles of his own being. It is a web no creature of earth has ever spun before. Like the orb spider, man lies at the heart of it, listening. Knowledge has given him the memory of earth’s history beyond the time of his emergence. Like the spider’s claw, a part of him touches a world he will never enter in the flesh. Even now, one can see him reaching forward into time with new machines, computing, analyzing, until elements of the shadowy future will also compose part of the invisible web he fingers.

    Yet still my spider lingers in memory against the sunset sky. Spider thoughts in a spider universe—sensitive to raindrop and moth flutter, nothing beyond, nothing allowed for the unexpected, the inserted pencil from the world outside.”

 

"Let man spin his web, I thought further; it is his nature. But I considered also the work of the phagocytes swarming in the rivers of my body, the unresting cells in their mortal universe. What is it we are a part of that we do not see, as the spider was not gifted to discern my face, or my little probe into her world?"

Resurrection - Leo Tolstoy

By Leo Tolstoy


There is a warmth of a good absorbing story or book whenever I read something by Tolstoy. Long comforting sentences, which wrap the story around you like a blanket. Perhaps such writings are best which communicate to you without you letting know consciously about anything. Just complete absorption with the narrative; the way life is. Just that a book lends a completely new world to you. Some of the golden moments of reading!

It begins so:

"Despite the best efforts of people congregating in hundreds of thousands on one small spot to disfigure the land they had squeezed on to, despite their clogging the land with stones to make sure nothing could grow, despite their elimination of every last grass shoot, despite the fumes from coal and oil, despite the lopping of trees and the driving out of animals and birds, spring was still spring, even in the city...."

...It happens to be spring-summer in my hemisphere.

**

Later: Still in Book 1. Some 180 pages in I come across a chapter which is not story but the writer's take on the world. And I disagree. So giving the book a pause. But apart from it, it is like other Tolstoy books, it carries you along on the reading journey until something jarring like this comes up.

Daughters of the Vicar by D.H. Lawrence

A short book, perhaps a novella, perhaps a long-short story. 

As I often feel when I read Lawrence, the thinking or the writing is at a different plane at times. The story proceeds like many other such novels, which are straightforward on surface, but the psychological aspects or aspects of the psyche of the characters explored here are quite different. They seem to be on a more nuanced plane. Still, in a coherent narrative whole, not in terms of character's self-chatter, just the reality of the situation explored at multiple planes by the author. 

"There was a doggedness in her voice. She went about very quietly. In her soul, she knew what was going to happen. She knew that Mr Massy was stronger than she, and that she must submit to what he was. Her physical self was prouder, stronger than he, her physical self disliked and despised him. But she was in the grip of his moral, mental being. And she felt the days allotted out to her. And her family watched."

Inspector Imanishi Investigates - Seicho Matsumoto

After a long time I am reading a page-turner of sorts. A detective novel. But because it is late 1950s or early 1960s Japan, because it is a different world from modern police drama, it is a read into Japan of those times as well. Quite happy reading it. And wish to read more from the author and in the genre. The joys of a completely absorbing read are quite something! 

Also, alternating it with a couple of other Japanese books referring to that period quite close in decades- Makioka sisters (late 1930s), A pale view of hills (late 40s? early 50s?), it makes the country come alive through different vantage points to the same few decades. 

When it becomes too much, I have Brothers K to return to - which I am glad to report, is past its mid point.

**

Later, finished this one. Last few chapters felt rushed. It could be the reading, it could be the writing. But as a window, the book is a very interesting vantage point in Japan of that time.

A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro

By Kazuo Ishiguro

His first book. It unfolds in Nagasaki, right after the war, where so many people are still living, or trying to live looking forward while deeply in the shadows of the past. Everyone has suffered in the war, inhumane sufferings which put a question on the forward in life too, yet life persists, and though the war has changed life, its meanings, its constituents, people's hopes and dreams, yet people pick up the pieces and move forward. 

Although the book doesn't talk about all this, the war and its effects, explicitly but you feel it in the shadows in people's lives. Perhaps that's what a good book does, by recreating the world for you, make you feel the things that are given in that world, and people would not go about talking too much about the given, but it is in the very fabric of their being. Perhaps why we read, and hope to read good books, to get a glimpse of different times and spaces, where the 'given' things in life are very different from the reader's world.

It is not a very long book. Still reading through. 

**

Later. Finished the book.

A few quotes from here and there:

"So many women get brainwashed. They think all there is to life is getting married and having a load of kids."

I continued to watch her. Then I said: "But in the end, Niki, there isn't very much else."

--

"The Americans, they never understood the way things were in Japan. Not for one moment have they understood. Their ways may be fine for Americans, but in Japan things are different, very different." Ogata-San sighed again. "Discipline, loyalty, such things held Japan together once. That may sound fanciful, but it's true. People were bound by a sense of duty. Towards one's family, towards superiors, towards the country. But now instea there's all this talk of democracy. You hear it whenever people want to be selfish, whenever they want to forget obligations."

--

"But it's so good to come out here. Today I've decided I'm going to be optimistic. I'm determined to have a happy future. Mrs Fujiwara always tells me how important it is to keep looking forward.

[...]

Whenever I see her, I think of myself I have to be like her, I should keep looking forward. Because in many ways, she lost more than I did...."

On reading older books

Somehow I feel books need time, like pickles. A little bit of sun of years, time and distance - either in space or of time. Space is becoming similar amongst the new writers across the world. Unless they herald from a very different life of a very different times than modern readers, the world unfolding in a novel is too close to the lived reality of a reader. And for me, somehow that doesn't work very well. I can read it, I can enjoy it too, but the satisfaction that sometimes comes on finishing a book from a different time and place - part of it is the difficult joys of literature, part of it is just displacement and the rich reward of a new world - is quite sublime. 

Distance provides the frame to hold more than proximity does. Makes the unfurling world rich in detail and narrative, and at times, wholeness, which because the current modern world is still too close, still resolving itself into patterns which can become clear only after an age has passed by, somehow miss out on the deep dark ripe fruits of time. In the reader's mind perhaps, because a writer is always the same, writing from a point in time, sometimes at a remove, sometimes from the thick midst of story. So it must be the reader that brings time to the table, time and distance, to stories of a time and place, a world apart from the one the reader lives in.

One learns new things about oneself as one grows. I sort of find this again and again about myself, at the closure of every book. The depth of joy is different with books of different time periods, and more so from a different life. Guess the joys of modern fiction will be preserved for future readers, for us, at least for me, the two millennia and more that have passed and have left their works like seashells on a seashore are joys plenty.

One Italian Summer - Pip Williams

By Pip Williams

I recently read her Dictionary of Lost Words, and The Bookbinder of Jericho (over the last 12 months), both of which I enjoyed, and was open to more from her voice and cadence. So when a friend found this book, which is a memoir, I was all up for reading it.

It is sunny book, recounting one summer that the author and her family spend in Italy working across farms for lodging and boarding. They travel with their two young sons. They wish to make a life on a farm of their own in Southern Australia, and for work experience, or rather a hands-on experience of managing a farm, they travel and work abroad. 

You almost see the future author's glimpse here. Who sees the dreams of the slow life, the good life as she calls it, but is perhaps not really finding it as the perfect outcome in just farming alone. She likes making and baking, and she likes the time that while the dough ferments and the bread bakes, she can quietly spend it with her ideas and notebook.

It is very interesting that so far (midway), apart from her recording the days and then spending time writing her thoughts, there's no reference that she wishes to be a fiction writer. It is interesting to see the cross-section of a life like this, the way it is being lived, the dreams recorded, the notes and their reference point before she became a popular author, and then perhaps a wonder about her life now. It somehow makes things accessible, just another person next door - her memoir is special because it is not about a famous person, but just everyday people trying to find a different life in the modern world.

Tum Ek Gorakh Dhandha Ho

 Tum Ek Gorakh Dhandha Ho

(You are an artful enigma!)

Tum Ek Gorakh Dhandha Ho - Detailed here. Following quotes from the post followed by English meanings.

“Tum Ik Gorakh Dhanda Ho” is a philosophically and spiritually rich poem that was written by Naz Khialvi (1947-2010), a Pakistani poet and radio broadcaster. It explores theological debates and paradoxes, such as the problem of evil, free will versus determinism, the validity of different religions, and selective divine intervention. Full of Islamic, biblical, historical, and literary references, “Tum Ik Gorakh Dhanda Ho” is a masterpiece of modern Urdu poetry.

Examining the abundant references in “Tum Ik Gorakh Dhanda Ho”, there are three main categories. The first group includes prophets and key religious figures: Adam, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Husayn bin Ali are all mentioned. The poem alludes to miracles and incidents from their life stories. The second group consists of prominent Sufi mystics: Mansoor al-Hallaj, Shams Tabrezi, Sarmad Kashani, and Sultan Bahoo. According to tradition, the first three were executed for their heterodox beliefs. Third, the poem references the heroes and heroines of romantic folk tales from Arab, Sindhi, and Punjabi literature: Laila-Majnoon, Heer-Ranjha, Sassi-Punnu, and Sohni-Mahiwal. All of these romances are tragedies, in which the titular couples meet their end in the pursuit of love, much like Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.

 

At times I searched for You here, at times I traveled to find You there.

Just to catch a glimpse of Your sight, how far I have traveled!

Similar wanderers have been wiped away and ruined, but

None have found any trace of You to this day.
You are not, yet You are everywhere.
You are an artful enigma!

With much majesty, You manifest Yourself in each atom.

But my intellect is astonished by how you are, what you are!
You are an artful enigma!

I looked for You in the temple and mosque; You cannot be found there.
But I have seen You gracing my heart with Your presence!

You are an artful enigma!

I have not found You despite searching; without searching, You appear somewhere.

And then there is this spectacle that You are wherever I am!

You are an artful enigma!

When besides You, there is no second in existence,

Then I do not understand why You veil Yourself!

You are an artful enigma!

In the mosque and temple, Your clever manifestation is present.

Your one face serves as the light of both these two homes!

You are an artful enigma!

The individual who has lost himself in Your affection,

It is that lost person who has actually found something!

He found You in neither the idolhouse nor in the Kaaba.

Rather, he found You in his broken heart.

You have hidden in one place, taking the form of nothingness.

While in another place, You have come in the form of existence.

If You are not, then why deny it?

Even negation reveals Your existence.

That which I am calling my own existence –

If not You, then what else could it be?

If You did not enter into my thoughts,

Then how did I recognize You as God?

You are an artful enigma!

I am astonished by the thought of who You are, what You are.

If I can grasp You, are You an idol? But if not, then You are God?

You are an artful enigma!

How can one who is enclosed in our comprehension be boundless?

How can one we understand then be considered God?

You are an artful enigma!

The philosopher does not find God in his argumentation.

He is untangling the cord but cannot find its end!

You are an artful enigma!

You tell everyone that Your address is “nowhere”,

How surprising it is, though, that You live in a broken heart!

You are an artful enigma!

When there is none except You in existence,

Then what, O God, is all this commotion about?

You are an artful enigma!

You neither hide nor come forth!

Even when showing Yourself, You do not show Yourself!

You do not wipe out quarrels between the temple and mosque [i.e. different religions].

You do not tell us what the actual truth is.

I am surprised at how You have occupied my heart,

Though even the two worlds [i.e. heaven and earth] cannot accommodate You!

Why this shrine and mosque, this church and temple?

Whenever there is disloyalty, You do not tell us!

You are an artful enigma!

My astonishment has dyed my heart a wondrous color!

You have drawn up a confused picture;

I do not understand what this whole affair is!

What is this game You have fabricated since eternity?

Having made the soul a prisoner to the body,

You have then placed it in the custody of death!

Having given the bird of Your plan the opportunity to fly,

You have placed the trap of destiny for it on each side!

Having decorated the two worlds for eons,

You have also established a plan for their destruction!

Though in any case You claim to be without a home,

You have also given the message that “We are nearer…” [Qur’an 50:16]!

This badness, that goodness, this hell, that heaven –

Do explain to me, what is the point of this jumbled mess?

Adam sinned, yet his children were given the punishment!

What kind of standard of equity and justice have You kept?

By giving mankind Your viceregency on Earth,

You have made a mockery of the world!

You made everyone for the sake of recognizing You,

But You have hidden Yourself from everyone’s vision!

You are an artful enigma!

Continuously You make and erase new designs.

Who knows which crime of desire You punish us for!

At times, You turn pebbles into a mine of diamonds!

At times, You even blend diamonds back into the soil!

He [Jesus] who gave life to so many corpses –

Even that Messiah, You cause to adorn crucifixes!

When one [Moses] sits on Mount Sinai with the wish of seeing You,

You set Mount Sinai alight with a lightning bolt of splendor!

You Yourself get Your friend [Abraham] thrown into the fire of Nimrod,

But then You Yourself turn the fire into a bed of roses!

You throw the Moon of Canaan [Joseph] into a well of Canaan;

You extinguish the light from Jacob’s eyes [making him blind].

One time You sell Joseph in the bazaars of Egypt,

But ultimately You make him [like] the king of Egypt!

When one [Mansoor] reaches the height of divine attraction and intoxication,

Sitting in his heart, You give voice to the words “I am the Truth!”

Then You Yourself place charges of blasphemy on him;

You Yourself make Mansoor hang by the noose!

One day he too loses his life

Whomever You give the desire to witness Your sight!

If some Ranjha departs on a search for You,

You torment him in the forests of Jhang!

If some Qais embarks on a quest for You,

You turn him into a madman for some Laila!

If love for You awakens in Sassi’s heart,

You scorch her in the burning Thal Desert!

If Sohni pictures You as Mahiwal,

You drown her in turbulent waves!

But if You desire, You summon Your beloved [Muhammad] to the highest heavens,

And in just one night, You have him complete his ascension to heaven!

You are an artful enigma!

You are Your own veil!

You are an artful enigma!

I realize that what I say seems bad to You,

But still, I have a complaint to You in any case!

You remained quiet, looking from Your Sublime Throne at

Muhammad’s grandson [Husayn] in the heated battle at Karbala!

How he offered his blood as a drink of loyalty,

Even though he had been thirsty for three days!

His enemies were, after all, enemies – but how sad it is

That You did not provide him with even a little bit of water!

The bounty for every cruelty is the inheritance of the oppressor,

But the oppressed is granted neither consolation nor comfort!

As for the person whose head was adorned with a crown yesterday,

Today, I see a beggar’s bowl in the same person’s hands!

If I ask what all this is, You say in response:

“No one can be acquainted with this secret!”

You are an artful enigma!

You are a world of bewilderment!

You are an artful enigma!

You are in each and every place, but I do not know Your whereabouts.

I have heard Your name, but I do not see any trace of You.

You are an artful enigma!

If the heart’s wish gets fulfilled, it glows like a firefly.

But if it gathers in the eyes, it ends up as tears.

If an impure soul gets lost in Him and repeatedly chants His name,

He receives lordships and becomes like Sultan Bahoo!

Some receive not the slightest of injury under the knife,

While, at another time, an arrow pierces Asghar’s throat!

You are an artful enigma!

How carefree You are, too!

A lengthy saga You are, too!

You are an artful enigma!

On the path of inquiry, I see confusion at every footstep.

I see that discord between circumstances and ideas.

I become a picture of distress

Whenever I closely look into the world’s mirror.

On the same earth, there are so many conflicts of nature.

I see one courtyard divided into so many parts.

In one place, it is the season of the smoldering autumn of hardship.

In another place, I see the descending monsoons of mercy.

Somewhere hissing rivers, somewhere silent mountains.

Somewhere jungle, somewhere desert, somewhere rose gardens I see.

This state of division makes me weep tears of blood.

Here I see some rich, some poor.

In the day’s hands, there is only one smoldering sun.

But I see that the night’s maang is adorned with many stars!*

In one place are the withered flowers of truth.

In another place I see the thorns of deceit flourishing.

In one place, I see Shams’s skin being flayed off.

In another place, I see Sarmad’s head coming off.

What is this thing called night, what is dawn?

What is this light, what is this darkness?

After all, I am supposed to be Your deputy.

So then why do You say, “You have naught!”?

You are an artful enigma!

What could someone looking for You see?

You have veiled Yourself in every manner!

You are an artful enigma!

Mosques, temples, and these taverns:

Some people believe in this; some believe in that.

All of them are Your homes, Dear!

Some people believe in this; some believe in that.

One is persuaded of Your existence;

Another is inclined towards denial.

But You alone know the reality.

Some people believe in this; some believe in that.

One considers You part of creation;

Another says You are separate from the rest.

Both are Your intoxicated devotees!

Some people believe in this; some believe in that.

When all are lovers of Your name,

Why are there quarrels between Rahim and Ram [Muslims and Hindus]?

You are an artful enigma!

You are in the temple, the mosque, the heavens, and the earth.

However far one’s reach goes, You are there for him!

You are an artful enigma!

In every possible aspect, You are unique!

You are an artful enigma!

The center of our quest; the world of color and scent:

In every breath, You are manifest. You surround us on all four sides!

In God’s surroundings, there is nothing but Him.

You are very enchanting, You are very beautiful!

Glories of heaven; dignity of the earth:

You are the attainment of the desires of the two worlds.

My eyes have performed ablutions with tears.

Now at least grant me a small taste of Your sight!

Come out from Your veil, face-to-face with my eyes.

For a few moments of union, just two hours of discussion!

Naz would mutter in devotion, in every place and every alley,

“He is one, He is one, He has no partner!”

God is, God is, God is, God is!

*