The Possibility of an Island

By Michel Houellebecq

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

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

Started reading this one. My first Houellebecq. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The essay can be found here.

*

Some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The analogy was that of the catalyst.

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

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

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

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

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

Art in Nature by Tove Jansson

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

Following from a sketch about a cartoonist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

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

And Quiet Flows The Don by Mikhail Sholokhov

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

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

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

*

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

Rock, Paper, Scissors by Maxim Osipov

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

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

The Foreword in its entirety:

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* 

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

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

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