Adonais - a poem by Shelley

 In an introduction to an essay by Eiseley (elsewhere), I came across these lines from Shelley:

        The splendours of the firmament of time
       May be eclips'd, but are extinguish'd not;
        Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
        And death is a low mist which cannot blot
        The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
        Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
        And love and life contend in it for what
        Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

Looking up the complete poem, it is Adonais, written by him on Keats' on his early passing away from this Earth. Across 55 passages, it is longer than the usual poems I end up reading, but the lines above got me in, and I did read through. And it is something one needs to read a few times to perhaps absorb well. I still imbibe Four Quartets though it has been years and years of reading it. Some poems or sometimes fragments do pass through into the present continuous of one's head and lifetime, and for that, one is glad.

A few more passages from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats

IX

        Oh, weep for Adonais! The quick Dreams,
        The passion-winged Ministers of thought,
        Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
        Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
        The love which was its music, wander not—
        Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,
        But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot
        Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,
They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again.

XXI

        Alas! that all we lov'd of him should be,
        But for our grief, as if it had not been,
        And grief itself be mortal! Woe is me!
        Whence are we, and why are we? of what scene
        The actors or spectators? Great and mean
        Meet mass'd in death, who lends what life must borrow.
        As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
        Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.

XXXII

       A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift—

       A Love in desolation mask'd—a Power

       Girt round with weakness—it can scarce uplift

       The weight of the superincumbent hour;

       It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,

       A breaking billow; even whilst we speak

       Is it not broken? On the withering flower

       The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek

The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.

XXXIX

       Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,

       He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;

       'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep

       With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

       And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife

       Invulnerable nothings. We decay

       Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

       Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

If anything, the poem has inspired me to read Keats again, his poems, and more than that, his letters - keen to get the feel of his voice and thoughts again.
Here Adonais
Here Keats

 

 

The Spare Room - Helen Garner

By Helen Garner

My first book by the author. Shadows of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Malte Briggs talking about the big death of the Count. As one grows older, perhaps preoccupations of the mind too change as a carer and one cared for. Life that comes to all of us in its changing form from birth till our last day on Earth. Some things we do, and some are done to us. 

The book is intensly written, felt, and perhaps read like a long short story. Spread over a few weeks, the stage being a friend who is dying, and a friend who is caretaker for a while, the agonies of human beings in such close shared contact, where the miseries of terminal illness spread its darkness on the mood. 

Yet life persists, people persist,  there is sunlight in lived and shared moments, and strange sequences non-linearly bind us together closer, as in sometimes, putting aside the masks of politeness work out better in the non-normal situation where one faces something life-defying. Yet life beams through us, its persistence guiding our beings, our actions, one feels that life affirms itself. This brief candle...is only there while we breathe, so by default or by tautology, life keeps insisting on life, till the last breath. Life and warmth.

*

I have with me her stories as well. Read about her recently in the book on reading. In my growing familiarity with Australian authors, she is the latest new one. I do not usually read more contemporary works. I got reminded of Julian Barnes and the Lemon Table, where again the dusk of life casts a different light on the lived life and the color of everyday. Style is such that normally a slow reader like me can pick up and read through in a few hours, dialogue, breathing space, and the intensity and crispness. 

The Last Gift of the Master Artists - Ben Okri

By Ben Okri.

The book was released as Starbook in 2007. And re-released, edited, updated as The Last Gift of the Master Artists in 2022. That is the form I first borrowed it a few months ago. But could not read it then. Then found Starbook at a second-hand book sale. And as I started reading it I realised it is the same book as Master Artists. Since Master Artists is the updated version by the author, I began the book again, and this time, finished reading it. 

It begins with a beautiful, gentle instruction of 'Read Slowly'. And it talks about the unspeakable miseries and yet the regeneration and healing. 

The rythms of storytelling is sometimes different in authors. Perhaps different countries and cultures tell stories in their own way. And that at times seeps into the way a novel or a story is written. 

Many, many sentences are inspiring. Some copying here for future-ref.

Destiny conceals strange illuminations in the suffering that life visits on us.

 

The young all have clear eyes, but hers had a touch of paradise.

 

He felt he carried within him the wisdom of multitudes, a thousand forms of dying, a million ways of living, an understanding of the simplicity of all things. He had the lucid feeling that the many ways led to the one. The many forms were one formless harmony. The thousand histories were all one moment, one breath. All suffering and living was just one astonishing tale of illusion.

 

The heron made the subtlest movement, enough for its magnificence to be revealed, and the prince saw it as a radiant thing in a dying world. Appearing to have no interest in anything at all, it struck the water swiftly, and casually swallowed down a fish. It did this with great economy.

As it flew it changed all things and restored a new attention to the world.

But love which is felt for apparently no reason, felt because of an ineffable affinity, because a people can’t do otherwise, is a love inspired by the gods.

The prince sat and waited patiently for time to turn him into nothing or into everything.

She learnt also from the mood he created around him.

My daughter, if God cracks the sacred vessel, God leaks into it. What God breaks, God fills. We break that we may be blessed. We have to make a choice about who we are going to be, but we have not made it. We suffer because we have not chosen. We could be powerful on this earth. Instead we scratch the soil, like animals.

At the shrines of creativity and truth, they were humble. To them the god of art ensured balance and harmony in the universe.

Maximum effect from minimum effort was the artistic principle on which war was conducted.

The tribe was therefore fundamentally serene about all things. They lived in the freedom of a knowledge that was more than knowledge.

The greatest masters say nothing about their work because there is nothing to say. There is nothing to say save that it was done. It was seen, rendered, and remembered. It was carried across, brought here, imperfectly.

She would sit quietly on the floor and watch him work, or pace, or stare at the wall. Then suddenly he would pounce on an unfinished work. With swift sure motions he would carve from the block of wood a living form that a moment ago didn’t want to live.

They ended a task with the same tranquillity with which they began it. They were never tired, never elated. They began and ended in the same mood, engaged in an infinite work in which beginnings and endings were merely illusions.

We seek the source. That’s why we are detached about what we create. It serves a higher purpose than we understand. The artist who creates is not important. Through our works must shine not the power of the person, but the power of the source.

The true quest is for peace and simplicity, an intuition in which all things are clear.

Understanding is a glass of pure water. All great truths have no taste.

He was an outsider who had thought more deeply about art and life than any of the age.

She saw the heart of things without trying. She knew that true mastery comes once or twice in a hundred years.

Masters are born only once or twice in the life of a people. The truly gifted are rare. There are at best very hard workers who have found a personal language with which to say nothing profound.

As her father had said for as long as she could remember, the deep can only come from the deep.

Many want to understand, but few have the character for it,’ she said, at last. ‘And it takes character to receive. It takes character to wait, to listen, to learn, to master, to keep on the right road, to make mistakes and to correct them before they have gone too far. It takes character to always remember, beyond wealth and success, what the most important things in life are.’

If the foundations are not strong, the house will fall, with or without the rats.

I must show her, without showing her, how to make time a friend, a guide, a magician, by using the art of delaying. It is something the new generation is forgetting.

A woman must learn the art of making time stand still. Of stretching time out. You must learn to make time live in your house, while history is being made. Keep it under your pillow, with your dreams. Make time a great friend. And how do you do this? This is something you must learn for yourself. It’s the only way you will learn it. But I will tell you why you must learn it. It’s because everything goes. Beauty, earthly power, fortune, wealth, happiness, clans, tribes, empires. Everything goes away. Disappears. But you can make them disappear more slowly. You can make them wait longer. You can charm them to stay for one more day. And if you do this, day after day, then you can manage a modest eternity. Only with love can you do this. But not an ordinary love. A love greater than life itself.’

Even things that go, you can charm them back, their fragrance, their spirit. If their spirit is here then they are here too, and soon their form will return in another way.

They saw better when they did not understand. For understanding stopped them looking. Consequently they liked to delay their understanding.

She was taught that wisdom is greater than force, grace more magical than power, love stronger than hate.

She was searching for something which could not be sought, but could only be received.

She asked no questions, sought no answers, forgot all techniques, discarded all craft, abandoned her heart, left behind her mind, ceased to be a woman, or even human, became blind, refused speech, and in complete emptiness, like one without beginning or end, she received what emerged from her dreaming in wood.

THROUGH ALL THIS her father was silent. He made his art with his usual serenity. He appeared not to register that anything unusual was going on. He didn’t seem to notice the fury directed at his family. He went about his business as though he lived in a separate realm. In that realm the significance of events was radically different from that of the real world. He was invincible. This strengthened his mystique, and magnified the power around him.

The moment people are unjust to you, they have lost the fight. The moment they attack you, they have lost the war. The moment they try to humiliate you, invalidate you, or destroy you, that moment they have lost the truth. Then they lose all spiritual protection. That moment they surrender power and authority to you, but they do not know it.’

Carry on your work. Be serene. Follow your conscience, and have no fear. The laws that operate in the world are invisible laws. But they are greater than the force of nations. You can depend on these laws.’

Like some flowers, some babies, she had an air of innocent invincibility, as if she knew that she could and could not be destroyed. As if she knew some simple secret of eternity. A new smile appeared on her face.

The masters sought therefore only to be open. They made themselves open to the work’s secrets, its language, its inspiration, its guidance.

It’s not being a prince or a king that is special, my son. It’s being alive to the mystery of life.’

When he wanted to express that which was beyond expression, he kept silent.

A season of humility will do you good. A season of humiliation would put power in your veins and some ripening rage in your heart.’ The king was no longer laughing. ‘To be all things is to be human. Exile, slavery, warfare, madness, folly, grandeur – these are the food of the brave. All will be tasted at the feast before you become king. But the greatest fruit of all, my son, is love. If through love you learn the art of being human, then you will be a great prince and a joy to the gods.’

This charged atmosphere, seeping into the statues and masks and carvings, was what created the highest mystery in the works. When finished, the works were not complete. They needed to absorb an atmosphere richly treated in enchantments and sorceries and dark beautiful suggestiveness. They needed to be treated in ancient moods.

This was the most important work that the spirits performed. They steeped the finished sculptures in enigmas.

It demanded utmost stillness and concentration. For the master, concentration was a form of humility. An acute receptivity.

Time seemed a river in which past, present, and future were all one. The artists bathed in that stream, drawing from it inspiration without end.

They were drawn to the beauty that a work creates in the mind. They were fascinated by the mental and spiritual beauty created by the work but not residing in it.

They were interested only in what exalted states the work of art could induce

Everything in the workshop was eager to teach him. Stones yielded the secret of structure, spiders the secret of making, walls the art of the vertical. The air taught invisibility, feathers taught flight, and the light that came in through chinks in the wall revealed to him the underlying secret of all things, in hints and fragments of illumination.

Everything was eager to teach him. He was eager to learn.

The master was pondering how high a thing can be before human beings begin to grasp it; he was thinking how invisible a thing must be before human beings can see it;

There are many other arts greater than the art of making art out of wood or stone.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘Like the art of making life out of death, wisdom out of suffering, good out of evil.’

‘He has no interest in creating art. He wants to become art. I don’t know what art he wants to become.

Tranquillity in a person is an achievement. It is the result of great insight.’

Intelligence can be a form of blindness; it can prevent people from seeing truth. People value their mental powers even as they increase their fundamental errors. Trust those who have simplicity of spirit, goodness of soul, and an inquiring mind.

People’s opinions don’t amount to much. Their plans work for a while then pass into nothing. Only convictions on the side of life really amount to anything. Do not fear sorcerers or those who conjure for the devil. As long as you do not believe in evil they cannot harm you. Fear is the most powerful form of belief. Do not fear anything. There is only one cure for fear, and that is wisdom.

All time is here. Don’t trouble yourself about passing sufferings, fashions, ideas, disasters, failures, successes, or triumphs. All are illusions. Maintain a sublime detachment from all things and the greatest love will shine through you. Be silent. Be still. Sometimes our minds are our worst enemies. Do not hold preferences too strongly. Be guided by that still small voice within. Learn to listen to it. Drink the cup of suffering life gives you when it does. Pass through the narrow space. Do not cling to any fixed ideas of who or what you are. You are more than whatever you think you are. Being a prince is nothing compared to a man or woman who has discovered that deep down in them there are gods. Humility makes you great.

In spirit and in deeds, be light.

All Excerpts From

Okri, Ben. “The Last Gift of the Master Artists.” 

This material may be protected by copyright.

Heraclitus - Fragments

from Fragments.

A few of those fragments:

This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out. (Fragment 30)

Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed. (Fragment 35)

Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things. (Fragment 41)

You will not find the boundaries of soul by travelling in any direction, so deep is the measure of it (Fragment 45)

We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not. (49a)

Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. (51)

We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away (?) through strife. (80)

It is hard to fight with one's heart's desire. Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul. (Fragment 85)

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. (89)

It is not good for men to get all they wish to get. It is sickness that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, plenty; weariness, rest.  (110-111)

Self-control is the highest virtue, and wisdom is to speak truth and consciously to act according to nature (112)

 

Island Home - Tim Winton

A Landscape Memoir, by Tim Winton


Lyrical, poignant, beautiful. In this age of connected world, virtual world, and a world affected by changing climate, a narrative so grounded in geography, which, if not a contrasting thoughtchain, a reminder to reclaim the space we inhabit physically, in the way we know it, learn it, regard it, revere it, not in the way of possessing it, but owning it as one owns experience.

I have read Cloudstreet by Tim Winton long time ago, and more recently a memoir. I love the life in his language, there is so much energy and movement in it, almost like music, almost like dance, almost like beating poetry.

Wish to note down so many sentences that read like poetry. A few following:

In the semi-arid range country where I live these days, the heavens draw you out, like a multidimensional horizon. For most of the year the arrival of a cloud is something of an event. Along the south coast where I spend my adolescence, the air boils with gothic clouds. There the sky's commotion renders you so feverish your thoughts are closer to music than language. In the deser the night sky sucks at you, star by star, galaxy by galaxy, until you begin to feel you could fall our into it at any moment. In Australoa the sky is not the safe enclosing canopy it appears to be elsewhere. It's the scantiest membrane imaginable, barely sufficient as a barrier between earthbound creatures and eternity. Standing alone at dawn on the Nullarbor, or out on a saltpan the size of a small country, you feel a twinge of terror because the sky seems to go on forever. It has perilous depths and ocenaic movements. In our hemisphere the sky stops you in your tracks, derails your thoughts, unmoors you from what you were doing before it got you by the collar....

There is no denying the fact that there's something physically relentless about Australia, but there's also something hanuntingly paradoxical, for to even the most reverent observer it sometimes feels as if this contineent is more air than matter, more pause than movement, more space than time. The place is still itself. It continues to impose. It imprints itself upon the body, and in order to make sense of it the mind is constantly struggling to catch up. This is why, despite the postmodern and nearly post-physical age we live and work in, Australian writers and painters continue to obsess about landscape. It's not that we are laggards. We are in a place where the material facts of life must still be contended with. There is so much more of it than us. We are forever battling to come to terms. The encounter between ourselves and the land is a live concern. Elsewhere this story is largely done and dusted, with nature in stumbling retreat, but here our life in nature remains an open question and how we answer it will define not just our culture and politics but our very survival.

 

 

Tao Te Ching

On another blog, I copy poems which I like. I feel it is a good way to read slowly, typing in the words, letting it play a little more in the head. I am currently copying Tao Te Ching.

I think of the paradoxes and vastness of thought explored in Gita and Tao Te Ching. There is a liberating freedom of thought which does not bind the heavens for human purposes or enterpise which so much of western thought and philosophy seems to do. May be I do not know enough. But I keep looking for western thinkers and philosophers, deep thinkers, poets who do not consider the universe as bound with human purposes only. 

I feel we happen to be. We happen to exist. And yes, reality is only there because we perceive it, but this thought itself is a little construction of language, bound in its own formation. Any formation is foregoing of a formlessness and its freedom. Language constructs the world for us, so does thought, and at some level, our perception and our senses, picking the universe out in a form, from a formless mass. But underneath it all, it is something beyond us, our temporary ephemeral presence on this vast scene. 

Some of the Eastern thought, perhaps because East could continue uninterrupted for a long long time, the grammar and language and stillness allowed for certain thoughts to emerge. They sound more secure, wise, beyond the human fumbling, stumbling around the purposes, means and ways of existence. Perhaps the time and place allowed these thoughts to emerge, the relative security of the people with a long continuous history at a particular place. Perhaps. Because both Gita and Tao Te Ching allude to a universe bigger than our limited purposes. Underneath all is the Way. It comes closer to modern science than trying to bind the purpose of universe around human existence.

Yes, to us, being human is the all, but being human, is perhaps the only way that we can perceive the vastness and timelessness of eternity, and the limited fact of us, and yet the beauty and wonder of it all. I prefer the humbler, quieter, stiller approach to contemplate this universe rather than making it a playground of judging, loudly interacting Gods. There is a calm contemplation which cannot be anything but beautiful, which cannot be anything but true, which cannot be anything but good under all the fragmentary ephemeral purposes of vanishing actors on this stage. This I feel.

As the last verse reads:

The Way of heaven profits without destroying.

**

Later - I asked ChatGPT for some suggestions of thinkers from the Western world which echo or reflect perhaps the wider, less anthromorphic philosophy of universe - and it points me to: Heraclitus, Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, Meister Eckhart, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Pascal, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Emerson, Thoreau, AN Whitehead, Martin Buber, Heidegger, Weil, Thomas Merton, David Bohm, Alan Watts, Blake, Rilke, Robinson Jeffers, Heaney, Thomas Traherne....a long list amongst others to keep reading from, to keep looking up, to meditate, contemplate, think about this vast reality on which we appear for an instance, like a drop to the ocean.

**

From Ursula K Le Guin's notes on TTC:

Christian or Cartesian dualism, the division of spirit or mind from the material body and world, existed long before Christianity or Descartes and was never limited to Western thought (though it is the “craziness” or “sickness” that many people under Western domination see in Western civilization). Lao Tzu thinks the materialistic dualist, who tries to ignore the body and live in the head, and the religious dualist, who despises the body and lives for a reward in heaven, are both dangerous and in danger. So, enjoy your life, he says; live in your body, you are your body; where else is there to go? Heaven and earth are one. As you walk the streets of your town you walk on the Way of heaven.

**

One of the beautiful verses:

63. Consider beginnings

Do without doing.

Act without action.

Savor the flavorless.

Treat the small as large,

the few as many.

Meet injury

with the power of goodness.

Study the hard while it's easy.

Do big things while they're small.

The hardest jobs in the world start out easy,

the great affairs of the world start small.

So the wise soul,

by never dealing with great things,

gets great things done.

Now, since taking things too lightly makes them worthless,

and taking things too easy makes them hard,

the wise soul,

by treating the easy as harrd,

doesn't find anything hard.

Flappers and Philosophers - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The collected short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald


Enjoying reading the collected and previously uncollected stories. Reminds me a little bit of Katherine Mansfield. Three stories deep. 

There's a starkness, a world-inside-ness to the stories. Reminds me again why I love reading short stories. It has always felt like a gallery of many sketches by an artist, where a novel seems like one finished painting. Exploring the sketches has its own kind of joy. And each exploring a different subject.

And his particular style is that os sharp lines, a crystal clear gaze and seeing and then language. While you read them you are nowhere else. And although you wish to note down something every few sentences, the story carries you forward too swiftly for a stop. So I don't have much to note here as excerpts, just marking the joy.

*

I have been reading modern short stories as well by relatively contemporary people, but somehow they feel incomplete, episode like. They perhaps need to be called slices of life rather than short stories. There's some wholeness, resolution to stories of older times. Be it Katherine Mansfield, be it Doris Lessing, be it Chekov or Pushkin, or be it the old masters of short stories. 

*

Later - some of his stories are full of life like 'The Great Gatsby'. Some of them are sad, like 'The beautiful and the damned'. Perhaps it is the reflection of a reader in the read, but as happiness is transient, so is sadness. One needs energy and momentum in life to keep moving forward and discover the terrain of this country called life, sometimes happy, sometimes sad. Knowing that each passes, what is joyful, content or perhaps sacred is life itself, the energy that propels us forward. 

Somehow, my note against the fourth story. Life is strange, and it is just a story, but still, a writer has to redeem the world and humanity, somehow, implicitly, that is the great task, and then that is a truly great writer. I feel.

A great writer redeems the world and its humanity from whatever fate or circumstance or reality the world and life and humanity finds itself in. That is the gift of the Word. That is the gift of Language. And that is life and truth.

*

Letters from a Young Poet - Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore's letters.

Some excerpt to share the writing, and the warmth and tranquility in it. 

It is a slow read for me. Still in the early half of the book. Sometimes a few pages are enough to lend some good sunshine to the day. 

The book by Rosinka Chaudhri is a collection of letters which Tagore wrote to his niece. So many of these has been written from a boat on which he spent part of his time living and writing. They carry the lapping rythm of soft waters.

One sees such a large, beautiful, careless and generous peace in this idle, drowsy, peaceful, aimless world of nature and, in comparison, one can see such a persistently trying, belaboured, harassed, minute and constant disquiet within one’s self that, gazing at the shadowy blue line of the trees on the distant shore, one becomes quite inattentive.

I was sitting and thinking, why are our country’s fields, riverbanks, sky and sun bathed in such a deep melancholy? The reason might be that in our country, it is nature one notices the most—skies free of clouds, fields without any end, the sun beating down—in the midst of this man seems very insignificant—men come and go like the ferry boat from this side to that, one hears their faint, indistinct murmur, one sees their little bit of coming and going in life’s marketplace in the hope of small joys and sorrows—but how small, how brief, how utterly futile those indistinct murmurs, the snatches of song, that constant activity and work seem in this vast, expansive,

the evening as it falls on this river, these fields, this village, is so incredible, so vast, so peaceful, so immeasurable that it can only be felt silently; the moment you try to express it, you become restless.

…. I feel like writing on—but of nothing else, this sound of water, this sunny day, this bank of sand. It seems I’ll have to come back to writing of these same things to you every day—because when I get intoxicated I keep going on about the same thing…

Inwardly, I feel like laughing when I think of my own endless solemnity and deeply intelligent appearance—the whole thing feels like a farce.Within myself I too am just like them, a poor man, affected by joy and sorrow; I too have so many small demands from the world, so manyheartfelt tears for the smallest of reasons, so dependent in my life upon the grace of so many people!

so peaceful, so beautiful, so secluded—the river distributing affection and beauty on both sides as it goes winding along

an unknown, unseen river of our Bengal. Full of only love and softness and sweetness. No restlessness, yet it has no rest.

Motion, by itself, has an attraction of its own

It’s like sitting on a chair and absent-mindedly swinging one’s legs; on the whole the body is at rest, yet its extra energy, which never wants to sit still for a moment, has been given some monotonous work and kept unmindful….

The solitude and silence of the afternoons here are not to be found anywhere else.

inner lament of the entire vast world, not someone’s domestic story.

the limitless melancholy of this vast world.

One could imagine that mother earth lives with her own children and clamour and household work in the midst of society—but where there’s a little space, a little silence, a little bit of open sky, that’s where her vast heart’s hidden sadness and melancholy can appear; there, one can hear her deepest sigh.

 

The days over here keep lying there, sunning themselves in this way for twelve hours, and in the remaining twelve hours they wrap themselves up in the deepest darkness and go silently to sleep.

We too are flowing every day through many apprehensions, we cannot see our end, but He who has given us, in this limitless life, the tremendous force called our propensity, He alone knows how to use that force to direct us.

Man’s mind is a thing that functions in so many diverse ways—it moves in so many directions—and it has so many claims, that it must lean in one direction or the other. That is its life’s aim, its sign of humanity, its protest against inertia.

When one is living in Calcutta one forgets how astonishingly beautiful this world is. It is only when you live here that you comprehend that this sun that sets every day among these peaceful trees by the side of this little river, and the hundred thousand stars that silently rise every night above this endless, ashen, lonely, silent sandbank—what a surprisingly noble event this is. The sun, as it rises slowly in the east at dawn, opens a page in some tremendous book, and the evening gradually turns another enormous page in the sky from the west—what an amazing script that too is—and this barely flowing river and this sandbank spread across the horizon and the other shore like a picture—this neglected bit at the edge of the world—what sort of large, silent, deserted school is this!

I want writing that is quite simple, beautiful, sweet and generous

All Excerpts From

Chaudhuri, Rosinka. “Letters from a Young Poet.” 

This material may be protected by copyright.

An essay on Tagore - Amartya Sen

From The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen

The Argumentative Indian is a collection of essays on India, and figures from India.

--

This year I've tried to read books from/on India more, either through its authors or through its books. One of them is Tagore. Another is Kim/Rudyard Kipling. A friend had suggested essays by Ruskin Bond. Then a little bit of R K Narayan (Guide, and some essays). 

Came across the book Letters from a Young Poet by Tagore in a local library. Such a delight! More on the book elsewhere. But it is the sensibility, the writing, the world-view that makes Tagore such an inviting, humane read. There are authors whose thoughts lend you good sense, a wide-open thinking, an accepting, cosmoplitan, citizen of this world world-view. Something on the other end of spectrum from parochial. Something that lets you echo your humanity and lend tranquility at the same time.

While going through the Argumentative Indian, as my own personal approach to Amartya Sen's writing, I realise he who was educated at Shanti Niketan, and he shares some things about Tagore which anyone reading him would perhaps agree with and which perhaps are a much better mirror for a while and then guide to my thoughts on Tagore. He says it all in such a fine manner. Some excerpts from his essay on Tagore:

He was uncompromising in his belief that human beings could absorb quite different cultures in constructive ways

 

Indeed, in his educational writings the need for synthesis is strongly stressed.

 

There seems to me much force in Rabindranath’s argument for clearly distinguishing between the injustice of a serious asymmetry of power (colonialism being a prime example of this) and the importance nevertheless of appraising Western culture in an open-minded way, in colonial and post-colonial territories, in order to see what uses could be made of it.

Hatred of one group can lead to hatred of others, no matter how far such feeling may be from the minds of humane nationalist leaders like Mahatma Gandhi.

Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.’ (Tagore)

The tragedy, as Tagore saw it, came from the fact that what ‘was truly best in their own civilization, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country.’

as a pamphlet under the title Crisis in Civilization, he strains hard to maintain the distinction between opposing Western imperialism and rejecting Western civilization.

Whenever there is the least sign of the nest becoming a jealous rival of the sky[,] my mind, like a migrant bird, tries to take … flight to a distant shore. (Tagore)

 

He had practical, plainly expressed views about nationalism, war and peace, cross-cultural education, freedom of the mind, the importance of rational criticism, the need for cultural openness, and so on.

 

with Tagore pressing for more room for reasoning, and for a less traditionalist view, a greater interest in the rest of the world, and more respect for science and for objectivity generally.

 

Gandhi and Tagore. Two types entirely different from each other, and yet both of them typical of India, both in the long line of India’s great men… . It is not so much because of any single virtue but because of the tout ensemble, that I felt that among the world’s great men today Gandhi and Tagore were supreme as human beings. What good fortune for me to have come into close contact with them.

Sen, Amartya. “The Argumentative Indian.”  This material may be protected by copyright.

Australian Essays

Oxford Book of.

(Some excerpts). 

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Came across this essay - 'The Prodigal Son' by Patrick White where he talks about returning to Australia and residing in Castle Hill, and then eventually writing The Tree of Man. Some words from him:

So, amongst the rewards, there is the refreshed landscape, which even in its shabbier, remembered versions has always made a background to my life....Possibly all art flowers more readily in silence. Certainly the state of simplicity and humility is the only desirable one for artist or for man. While to reach it may be impossible, to attempt to do so is imperative. Stripped of almost everything that I had considered desirable or necessary, I began to try. Writing, which had meant the practice of an art by a polished mind in civilised surroundings, became a struggle to create completely fresh forms out of the rocks and sticks of words. I began to see things for the first time. Even the boredom and frustration presented avenues for endless exploration; even the ugliness, the bags and iron of Australian life, acquired a meaning.  As for the cat's cradle of human intercourse, this was necessarily simplified, often bungled, sometimes touching. Its very tentativeness can be a reward. There is always the possibility that the book lent, the record played, may lead to communication between human beings. There is the possibility that one may be helping to people a barely inhabited country with a race possessed of understanding.

*

The book itself has essays from 1800s to modern times. I am browsing through it, reading what catches my fancy. Like an interesting 1889 essay on 'The Australian Bush-woman'  by Louisa Lawson.  She roughly sorts 'her colonial sisters' in three heaps -  city women, country women and bush-women. And goes on to say about the bush woman - 'She is independent, taciturn, and the regularities and measured methods of town life appal her.' Hardy, hard-working, strong, used to the difficult life of drought ridden bush, the essay then details the life of a bush woman which is very different from the lives of city or country women. An interesting fact she points out is the number of women and girls in Australia in 1887, which is 471,000. Today the country's population is 27 million people, a country mostly populated by colonial immigrants and then other immigrants over time. 

Later she says, 'Time and our efforts may help to mend the world.' - which I find to be very hopeful mantra to carry around with me in my day.

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Drylands

By Thea Astley

I couldn't find her A Well Dressed Explorer in the library, so borrowed Dryalnds meanwhile. It is a book addressed to the world's last reader. That it is about books and reading pretty much got me. 

It is set in a small town in inland Australia, and the fictional writer who has been living there for a while, still, in a way, doesn't feel she belongs there, or wishes to belong there but finds herself an outsider. It weaves together her story, and her attempt at writing in this world which does not read, just watches, with the story of the town and a few of its people. Her sketches of the people sketch the town for us. And is written in a quite fast flowing un-put-downable language. I read the book in a couple of days. Generally I take much longer with books.

Keen to read more from her. One of the few books in my recent or current reads which is of these times. Although it talks about the modern world and its complexities of human relationships, it still has in its stories something fundamental about story telling. It deals with the universal emotions and not just the temporal of that particular time or place. There is 'bleakness' as the introducer says, perhaps a lot of it, but there's so much warm humanity rippling through it. It is quite warm in certain ways, in its humanity and the language is full of life. I guess life is warm. And the book beats with it. 

A Way of Being Free - Ben Okri

By Ben Okri

(Some excerpts)

Recently read a few of his essays, notes, reflections. Also recently in April-May, started reading his Last Gift of Master Artist which began with the gentle instruction 'read slowly'. Poetic, beautiful, deals with such negative abject issues, yet full of strength. Perhaps wholeness is found in such places, which at better planes surmounts the issues which lesser planes in their weak power hungry protagonists try to capture. A lot of hallucinations in it, a lot of poetic truths. Was leaving for India, and to read slow, and in the right strong mood or receptive free mood, the incidences of our meetings were limited. So perhaps some other time.  (Interesting note, the book is a rewrite of his earlier novel Starbook)

Meanwhile, found that spirit in his essays. A few lines to quote from here and there, will add here. Guess, read slow, let it be absorbed and become you.

Rigour and logic are perhaps not much appreciated, yet without logic, without rigour, writing fails. It took me many years to rid myself of needless complexities.

 

To say much, concisely, is a constant ideal.

 

The universe will always be greater than us. Our mind therefore should be like Keats’ thoroughfare, through which all thoughts can wander. It should also be a great cunning net that can catch the fishes of possibility.

 

We can place many perspectives side-by-side, we can even inhabit them simultaneously.

seeking attunement to the source of inspiration.

Paradoxically, it flows into all things: Playfulness lightens all terrifying endeavours. It humanises them, and brings them within the realm of childhood. The playfulness becomes absorbing, engrossing, all-consuming, serious even. The spirit warms. Memory burns brightly. The fires of intelligence blaze away, and self-consciousness evaporates. Then – wonderfully – the soul finds the sea; and the usually divided selves function, luminously, as one.

The play soon becomes its own sustenance. ‘I wonder how far I can take this?’ the smiling self asks. And the spirit of the encounter answers by taking leaps into the unknown, and creating terra firma for itself to land on. It answers by inventing roads where none exist, extending ones that do

play and discipline,

An ideal creative genius would be one who knew how to consciously initiate great play, as well as how to harness great discipline, towards the most sublime endeavours.

If nothing else, if that height is beyond us, then at least a joyful creative attitude to life can transform the chore and boredom of work into perpetual delight, and introduce the hint of a blessed smile into the challenges of our days.

The best kinds of books, however, have a delightful mystery about them. They inexplicably create powerful feelings, images, moods, worlds, and parallel narratives the farther away in time you are from the reading. They grow in time. They keep re-creating themselves in your consciousness, they keep growing, keep becoming other books, till they become part of your experience, like something lived, or dreamed, or loved, or suffered.  Further encounters with such books make them more. There is no final point of understanding with books that live. Their effects cannot be aspired to. And writers can never be altogether sure that they have indeed created this rare and living thing. For their mysterious effect can only be felt silently,

 

These books do not belong to their authors.

There is no need to panic. The intelligence that shaped the universe shaped you. There is an inner part of us, for ever obscured, for ever mysterious, which is most alive during the process of composition.

There is no genuine creative or human problem that cannot be solved if you are serene enough, humble enough, hardworking enough, and if you have learnt the gentle arts of concentration, visualisation, and meditation. For me, tranquillity is the sign of the invisible presence of grace.

And like all artists they should create beauty as best as they can, should serve truth, and remember humility,

Regardless of the ambiguous dark side, artists always feel the craftsman’s cool ecstasy and the dreamer’s serene joy when creating. And the reader always feels the joy in the dangers when immersing.

We are all wounded inside in some way or other. We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from one another. Healing in words, and healing beyond words. Like gestures. Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a smile, which someone described as the shortest distance between two people. Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.

I think we need more of the wordless in our lives. We need more stillness, more of a sense of wonder, a feeling for the mystery of life. We need more love, more silence, more deep listening, more deep giving.

We should return to pure contemplation, to sweet meditation, to the peace of silent loving, the serenity of deep faith, to the stillness of deep waters. We should sit still in our deep selves and dream good new things for humanity. We should try and make those dreams real. We should keep trying to raise higher the conditions and possibilities of this world. Then maybe one day, after much striving, we might well begin to create a world justice and a new light on this earth that could inspire a ten-

that we contain the universe inside us, that the sea is in the fish much as the fish is in the sea; that birds breathe their own flight; that forces in the human frame can interpenetrate matter, extend the bounds of time and space, enter the dreams of lions, and travel through the private histories of rivers and mountains.

Those who forget death forget how to live. The African world, by opening life into death, by drawing death over the living spaces, gave life more space in which to live, to celebrate, to bear suffering, and to be joyful.

The colonisation of Africa, and its subsequent representation, apart from being the triumph of greed over humanity, was the triumph of rationalism over the subconscious, the victory of the head over the spirit. That triumph, as any psycho-analyst would confirm, is short-lived, and ultimately disastrous

Apart from the wounding of the souls of continents, colonialism also – paradoxically – achieved an accidental serendipity. It brought people together in a way that might not have happened for hundreds of years.

The fact is that in nature all organic things of single strain have short histories.

We are all of us mixtures, and our roots are fed from diverse and forgotten places

The world is neutral: it is we who give things value. We could change the value we place on ourselves. We should always remember that it takes a certain natural genius to survive the depredations of history. We should reconnect that genius, for if we do not place the highest value on ourselves we cannot achieve the highest good in the world.

It is not the size of the voice that is important: it is the power, the truth, and the beauty of the dream.

It seems to me that the age demands that each man and woman become a light, a fire, a responsible heir to all the veins of freedom and courage that have enabled us all to get here, in spite of the forces of darkness all around. It seems our age demands that we all be clearer about ourselves than ever,

love for the greater way,

 

regeneration

 

The transparency of excellent stories: words dissolve words, and only things stand in their place. 47 In bad stories words cancel themselves out, and nothing is left. The words return to their source; they

48 Story is paradox. 49 The superiority of one writer over another is not just in the quality of language; but also in the quality of the story and the storytelling; the quality of enchantment; and the timelessness of that enchantment. It is therefore futile to speak of superiorities. There is only that which lives, and which keeps on living.

The infinite interpretability of great stories – and their serenity. 69 To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line.

The greatest guide is the clearest spirit and mind. 71 That’s what the true storyteller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness. Dante chose Virgil. I would choose Jesus, or the Buddha, or Lao Tsu, or Homer.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide. 81 The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. 82 The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. 83 The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.

A land beginning to define itself, to create beauty and order from its own

chaos, moves from having too many moods and stories in the air to having clear structures, silences, clear music, muted and measured celebrations, lucid breezes, freed breathing, tentative joys, the limpid freshness of new dawns over places sighted across the sea for the first time. If suffering breeds stories, then the transformation of suffering into a higher order and beauty and functionality breathes tranquillity.

Tranquillity is the resolution of the tensions and paradoxes of story into something beyond story: into stillness.

It is in the creation of story, the lifting of story into the realms of art, it is in this that the higher realms of creativity reside.

The true storyteller suffers the chaos and the madness, the nightmare – resolves it all, sees clearly, and guides you surely through the fragmentation and the shifting world.

there is something awesomely beautiful and history-making about those who have set out to climb the seven mountains of their predicaments, towards the new destinies that lie beyond, with the star of hope above their heads. For in their patience and in their egalitarian triumph they can teach us all how to live again and how to love again and could well make it possible for us all to create the beginnings of the first truly universal civilisation in the history of recorded and unrecorded time.

They have not as a people learnt how to snatch historical confidence from the most unlikely places, from the fact that they are still here on this planet, inhabiting some sort of space, that they often survived slavery and all manner of outrages, drought, famine, dictatorships, bad governments, bitter wars, mass imprisonments and other permutations of human viciousness. They many be dwindling but it is precisely because of all they have suffered and are still suffering that they have much to struggle for, to be alive for, beyond the mountains of their crisis.

but not necessarily on the sullied terms of the world dominators.

They have to regroup their powers and build again from the wedding of the best things the world has to offer and the best aspects of their own mythic, aesthetic, spiritual, and scientific frames.

With humility and with passion they could learn from the world and teach the world to learn from them.

The real quarrel of the oppressed is not with the oppressors. It is with themselves. The real truth they have to face is the truth about themselves. Hope and striving have magic in them. Those who have much to strive for, much to resolve and overcome and redream, may well be luckier than they think. Struggle is life. 

All Excerpts From

Okri, Ben. “A Way of Being Free.”

This material may be protected by copyright.

Morning and Evening - Jon Fosse

By Jon Fosse

Read the first part. Then on hold since a few weeks. It is a short book, perhaps would try to begin it again from beginning. 

But while reading, given the first part is about a birth, and the beautiful beautiful description Fosse has about the newborn's world view, and the new parents, a tangential thought around birth itself: A woman is very different from a man. To her, a womb. She passes through giving birth has an experience, which in humanity is limited only to the female of the species. Hosting a baby for 9 months in the body, and then the birth. Something in a woman is inclined to creating, or perhaps everything in a woman is inclined to creating, and caring/nurturing for the newborn. Perhaps at the basest code level. Over it comes the 'viscosity' of lived experiences, culture, community, thoughts, words, ideas, stories, would should could. But at the simplest, at her own, devoid of everyone and everything, she creates, she hosts, she takes care. And in it finds her 'self' forgotten, absorbed, the way people find harmony in meditation. To her nature has granted this pathway of creation and absorption in nurturing.

Now this 'creation', given one has ideas around number of children one's own, where else does it manifest? If it is an inclination, the keeping house, the hosting new ideas, the giving birth, the 'infinitely tired and infinitely calm' as Fosse says after birth. An amazing accomplishment one would think. Perhaps writers feel it with their books, perhaps - but the artist in me seems to be in that terrain where it doesn't know the line of 'enough' - it is perhaps discovered. To a mum, nature says 40 weeks of gestation, but to an artist, that discovery too is part of the journey of becoming an artist. Each idea seems to come marked with its own incubation period. That golden time with a project or idea for it to be ready enough to be hosted inside and then given life to… how long does that run? What is 'enough'? The choices to be made takes away the simplicity of birth, where the only role is nesting, birthing which happens as it would, and then nurturing. Perhaps let the ideas too be, handle them as if they are beyond you, coming with their own predetermined cycle, and all you do is be a conduit, a nest provider, a gentle nurturer, not loading it or overwhelming it, but making it be free, nurturing to independence, out of dependence. 

Perhaps in being an artist, anyone can live through being a mother - perhaps that is what art is for in this world, so that that beautiful experience of 'infinite tiredness yet infinite calm' after giving birth can be had by all beings. Perhaps.

The Glassblowers - Daphne Du Maurier

By Daphne Du Maurier

Still in the first third of the book. By her I have read Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel and perhaps something more. Hers are good reads - she takes you along on the reading journey. So is this one. Although this is less of her usual fiction, but more of a family history. In portraying the family, it also portrays the France of that period, 1700s. 

The Glassblowers live as a community, in the forests near the fuel source for the furnaces. It is art and craft and it is a closed world. But in this world if a family member wishes to stand apart, as part of the world outside, there is strife and friction. In it, reflection of any closed knit community, which keeps its members close, and in such close knit places the individual is not as much of an individual self as part of the community. For example, the father and his brother do not differentiate their surname, but the children have the need to be identified separately for their work. Perhaps also a reflection of where a craft becomes an art and individual flourishes come to be recognised rather than the provence of the workshop. 

Still early pages. 

The Brothers Karamazov

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

I have tried reading this novel so many times - bought perhaps 20 years ago. Now the cover page is crumpled and a little torn. In recent years itself I have tried to read it 3 or 4 times, but still I persist. Every time I begin it afresh trying to give myself new momentum. I am so familiar now with the opening pages and the introduction of the family until I reach the Grand Inquisitor and there somehow the steam gives up. And then it sits again for a while until I pick it up with renewed vigor. And so it goes.

This time around I am yet to reach Grand Inquisitor. Part of the reason I have slowed down Makioka Sisters is to keep company to the Brothers' story. Silly, but who knows what works. 

I really like reading it once I begin to read it. The writing has a beautiful quality to it which draws you in. It is oddly inspiring as well, like when the Elder Zossima asks Alyosha to keep working, work without rest. The surrender and the bond thus between two people, where one owns the responsibility for the other soul. 

Oddly this, soul, the sacredness of life, and yet at times the mental illnesses that bring chaos to thoughts and sometimes it is difficult to pick apart the one sacred thread, where none other would ever suffice. It all passes, one says. Reading from different times, with the perspective of distance, is akin to practical philosophy. One sees things pass, and learns patience, acceptance and a belief in that one sacred order which has any meaning, if there were any meaning to existence. But irrespective of that, one has one's life to order, to live well, and one begins where one is, and tries again in radiating outwards circles to take care of self and surrounds. With humility, and if possible with humour on the absurdity and ridiculousness of modern life. 

There is the Elder on one side, to learn from, to be inspired by. And then there is Karamazov, ridiculous, silly, what one could say attention-seeking individual, irreverent and just upsetting the peace of life around him, at times, provoking people to extremes. Perhaps this is the part of the question of novel, how much responsibility of the provocateur? How much of the provoked? Such tightly knit societies we live in, interacting with people - generally the politeness and the respect for individual and custom makes for smooth going, but sometimes, when these are trespassed, and one finds oneself alone in waters never traveresed before, and one knows not what experience to rely on, what except one's own upbringing to fall back to, and that too if the passion of the moment allows enough clear thinking. This upsetting of the normal, or pushing to the extreme of situations was something in the Idiot too. I liked that book a lot as well, the writing, the times it evoked, Myshkin. But at times it felt in the book that many situations could have been avoided if people could have just walked away. But they kept persisting, insisting on responses from people who know not their own depths or shallows especially in those random conversational currents. One doesn't meet people then, only a provoked artifact or remnant of a person, and what one gets out of it is like a chemical reaction not done before, one really doesn't know. But some of the situations could have been resolved by just walking away. It feels like that. Somehow people keep persisting and insiting and trespassing each other's customary boundaries in his books. Or perhaps it is about those situations and the ridiculousness of being human. The stakes never justify the actions. They are moments of impassioned unreason. And the solution at times is a night's sleep.

Anyhow, I am yet to read it. So more later.

**

Later - I have reached farther in the book than ever before.

There is a sunniness to the writing around the Elder, Zosima, while he is alive. There is warmth, hope, forgiveness and cheerfulness in those sections. Sometimes they starkly contrast: Zosima's lived reality, his sunniness stands very much in contrast with the cereberal discussions of Ivan about Grand Inquisitor and related previous chapter. As if the lived reality of Zosima is itself an answer to Ivan's questions and unresolved thoughts about humanity. There is no answer to many questions that Ivan raises, and perhaps anyone can raise, but there is an acted reality in the life lived by Zosima, a forgiving acceptance of whatever the world is. And yet that it is wonderful. It is the difference of perspective. My humble hope is for the sunniness, cheerfulness, optimism and forgiving acceptance of what is. Logic and reasoning can find no answer to some of the deeper questions of humanity, but faith and acceptance, a mind which can hold the world as it is yet forgive it, and be forgiven in it...

**

My other wonder as I read it, is Nabokov's note about reading... about reading the mind that wrote it, rather than just reading the narrative and characters. In Dostoevsky is Ivan's restless dark wonder as well as Zosima's sunniness. 

**

Finished it finally 2nd half of November.

The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki

By Junichiro Tanizaki.

Before this I had only read his essay, 'In Praise of Shadows' - which is a beautiful read and an aesthetic experience in itself.

I bought Makioka Sisters after the trip to Japan. This year or last 12 months I have read a lot, a lot of Japanese fiction - new, old. Most of Kawabata (though Snow Country was read long time back and perhaps needs a revisit), discovered Natsume Soseki (his Three-Cornered World one of my highly loved reads, and reading it I keep searching for similar reading experiences - but one finds it perhaps only in poetry from ancient China or Japan). The sense of the world and life is very different in poetry and such aesthetic works from that region. Very very different from the other Western readings from the same period. There is an airy quality to it, where Western words seem solid, somehow defined, Japan allows for definitions. I don't know if I express myself well, but there's a freedom in these writings which somehow make Western thought appear very rigid and the business of life very serious, such that they forget the aesthetics and wonder of life. 

Anyhow, Makioka sisters (I am somewhere half-way in the novel), is about four sisters and their life and times in Japan of 1930s. Osaka region mostly. Tokyo some. Reading it one of the phrase keeps resounding rightly or wrongly - a novel of manners. It is sort of a story but also a documentary of life and times of Japan of that time. There is movement forward but there is as much about the way of life, about little matters of day to day life which are so different in Japan compared to where I have grown up. Like they view the moon in a ceremony and each one writes a Haiku about it. Even the maid who works for them. Now, such formalised sensitivity and appreciation of the moon in daily normal life is somehow missing from the world I've grown up in. And then there is Kawabata and his novels around tea ceremony, the game of Go, his little by the way references to the flowers in the room or the painting that has been put up specifically for a guest, or for the day. I don't know if any other aesthetic captures the transience of life, honours it, appreciates it so formally as theirs. The world view one has is then so different, perhaps humbler than the rigid go-getter, jet-setter western world view. This I feel.

Like many other books I'm reading at the moment, the female preoccupation or concern is good marriage, since that is the way of life for women in most of these times and places, in fact for most of history. Women have worked alongside men, but mostly in family settings, or domestic settings. Very little public exposure as such. Be it Palace Walk (which is one end of the spectrum), to the Russians, to the Germans ir to the Japanese and French (which have very clear formalised customs on women and their apt work). 

Where do I stand on all this? I am grateful for the times I am born in, and that I get this opportunity - time and place to be a reader. I realise that born in a different time in the same place historically, it would have been well-nigh impossible. Be it man or woman. Any other place, any other time, still the chances are slim to the general population. Only these times of widespread education and access allow many things to many people which were never allowed or rather the correct word is accessible before. Appreciating this, is the first step I think. To not lose the perspective of how far we've come. Somehow I believe that the natural course and order of things is better than trying to push an order on things. All the science these days points towards this understanding of emergence, of emergent order - be it consciousness, be it time, or be it the human self. Systems allow an emergence. To let the nature emerge and settle into new forms rather than vehemently pushing an order because equality on it. The problem with saying this is, one is always an interested party and never objective, one couldn't say this if it were not the effort of people before us. And yet, pushing things or forcing things leads to worse outcomes, is what I feel. The way they say respect is earned. So it goes for some of these things as well, but then the question about opportunity itself, and there we enter the deep chaotic life and its questions- the social order we find ourselves in. 

My personal view is still on appreciating the long arc of history, the perspective of how far we've come, and celebrating it rather than all the time talking about how unequal the world is, gender wise. The world is what the world is, first to see it well, and then without pressure from the popular, or the general, to solve and attend to what needs attending to. One begins with self, and then surrounds in gently outward radiating expanding circles. One does it for one's capacity and reach and all the while ensuring that one wears one's own mask. There's a lot to be done. The world can be a much better place. But it still evolves. One perhaps chooses better if one sees better, has some perspective and a grounded humility in the transience of things. Perhaps that is why we read, to teach ourselves to see better, to learn from the best out there, and then in little expanding circles to bring it to the world around us. How else does change emerge?

*

More about the book itself once I finish it. I like it that it allows a slow pacing. And I very much like novels of a different time and place which ask you to imagine yourself in those contexts. 

*

Finished it 2nd half of November. Right along with the Brothers Karamazov.

A book on reading

I recently read a collection of essays on reading - in a book form (Pleasures of Reading?). This was by Australian writers writing on reading. There were a lot of reading ideas and inspiration and aspiration. Also, reading is perhaps generally one of the most favorite activities of any writer, so it had that love and passion in the writing as well which makes anything joyfully engaging. I literally zoomed through the essays, and came out with a long reading list. Many australian writings that I have not read before. Like in the course of this year or last, I have come across more of Patrick White (Tree of Man - which I loved, trying to read Vivisector, read Voss a long time ago), Tim Winton (read his essay somewhere and felt the language so alive and kicking that keen to read more of his essay-like prose. Read his land's edge and then a few more queued up. Bought boy behind the curtain. Between other books I read a page or two and feel the alive prose. Read his Cloudstreet long time ago), David Malouf (again, essay-like writing),  Murnane (essays mainly, couldn't read The Plains or Inland, read his short stories though), Thea Astley (I read her Drylands in almsot one go, couldn't find The Well Dressed Explorer in the library). And then many others have recommended Helen Garner. So I have between these authors and their queued up works a big aspiration list of readings.

Apart from the Australian writers, there's a lot of other writing on the aspiration list now. Some worth re-reading like Moby Dick. 

But generally I like readers writing about reading. Be it book blogs, or books, there is such joy in these writings. Sometimes it is like talking to people about books you both admire, or sometimes, it is just like gathering more material for your reading list. Generally a joyful activity.

Cairo Trilogy - 1. Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz

By Naguib Mahfouz


I picked it up a few years ago but somehow it didn't work then. Then recently saw it in the lending-sharing red library at the cafe - the whole set. Refrained from picking it up. But the desire to read and then that it is a nobel prize winner, led me to eventually download the book.

And this time, quite enticed. Already a few chapters deep. Perhaps to understand this, I have to first list all my current readings - esp the family books. And hopefully I'll write about each of them. I am currently at different bookmarks on The Makioka Sisters, The Brothers Karamazov, Buddenbrooks, The Glassblowers and a few others but these are the mainly family sagas of sorts. I tend to read many books at a time, and I like the approach. I like it that one is about 1930s Japan, another about 1800s Germany, the other about Russia and one about France during the late 1700s. I desire to add more but that in this backdrop I like seeing the various families and the customs of their times and place.

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Come to think of it, any of us could have been granted life in any of the time-space. That we were born where we were and are in times that we are in is a random chance. The world is full of unique lives, completely independent in their thought, their context, their choices, their world view and their attitude but dependent on their immediately radiating world for nature and nurture. That we can read and access these many different lives and times is a huge privilege I believe. If anything, it should make us appreciative of different contexts, different point of views and that what is the 'done' thing changes place to place, time to time, the truth too that way is contextual. So any generic or general standards of life are simply shortcuts, placeholders of thinking. Something that we have to teach ourselves - to 'see well'. To see things for what they are rather than judging them on some arbitrary generic standard. That the world arrives at best practices, and standards over time, is understood, but when it is not directly about law and order that makes the world a liveable place, I think the rest of us not directly involved can at least appreciate the things for what they are and try to see that way. This is as much a note to self, a reminder to learn to see well. 

This leads to further discussion. I picked it up with AI and it led me to a wonderful reading list shared elsewhere. One of them is Michael Oakeshott. My notes from elsewhere.

There is disparity in the way the people see themselves and the way policymakers see the world. Sometimes external standards are brought up on people without appreciating the people's way of being. But at the same time, policy makers have little time and big goals, so they bring standards and goals ... perhaps my seeing is partial in that way. But sometimes reading the fiction, it seems people are happy in their own way, and many a times, external standards make them compare to some norm which casts them as an unhappy or backward lot. I understand the imperative of the government. But where does appreciation of things as such sits? Or as a human being one is always morally staked, has to do something if sees some inequality, disadvantage - or should one first try to stop and appreciate the situation? I guess it is difficult to arrive at an objective answer. But what I am looking for is dispassionate thought-writing which is not driven by moral imperatives but can address the issues I face in my thinking about appreciation of what is, before pulling in or driving what should be.

In these instances, when one has not read around the subject much or is not close to a teacher or a mentor, chatgpt can be helpful. It suggests I look at Michael Oakeshott, Simon Weil, John Berger, Ivan Illich, Marilynne Robinson, Claude-Levi Strauss. It also suggests helpfully to keep a double notebook - of the world as it is, and the world that could be. It further helped me extend the list by adding Rilke, Dillard, Merton, Camus, Murdoch, Wendell Berry and many more - individual essays. Part of my reason of this blog is to keep a track of these readings - if I get around to them, what they incite in me, and what questions or thoughts do I have for them. 

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Back to Cairo Trilogy - it has been translated from Arabic. I need to read a little more before I can say further. But so far enjoying the introduction to the family.

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Later - I left the book a little later. Somehow there is a sensibility of looking at the world that either matches with your frequency broadly, or jars with it too much, too much of anti-wavelength at times. To an extent one can handle it, but I guess this one will be put away like the Buru Quartet from Indonesia. Too much of the female objectification makes it a tough read, it just seems written for male readers then. Some other time perhaps. (I quite enjoyed the set-up chapters. May overcome the jarring aspects sometime in the future). 

A short walk in Hindukush - Eric Newby

By Eric Newby

Downloaded it, then borrowed it.

I had read the review of the book on one of the review sites I revere, and hence was on the back of my mind. When I came across it, and started reading it, it pulled me in immediately. Maybe it is the humour, maybe it is the perspective, and that there is that self-deprecating humour with humility and the indefatigable spirit.

For example, after walking in his new boots when the condition of his feet is pretty bad, he still decides to push forward given all that he has put at stake (his job, his life in London), and that they have come thus far after going through so many troubles and that his friend has been so keen to climb. 

It feels like as if it is fiction while you are reading it, but then you look at the maps of Nuristan and their walking path, and the photographs, and the reality of it, against the humorous Wodehouse quality of it, the absurdity of situations and the humour, comes to hit you. It is quite wonderous that way. The humour in troubles is one thing perhaps I would like to carry from it, the perspective, and the comfort with discomfort, the appreciation of human frailty and absurdity and ridiculousness of life. 

One of the chapters I liked very much was about history of Nuristan.

The other thing I like is the appreciation of different lives in different contexts. Reading it this thought, that in a desert, water is more valuable than gold. We seem to be so embroiled in our daily lives (at times I am), and living on high serious horses, that this nonchalance and yet the aspiration, what one would call the audacity of their enterprise is heartwarming and inspiring.

Reading it for the joy of it. Still mid-way. (9/10/2025)