Their Eyes Were Watching God

A very short note to say that this was a delightful reading experience. The speed itself renewed faith in reading fiction, and the magic of fiction. Loved that the book stands for itself, like its characters. Strong, vibrant, life lived well, as in lived fully, by giving one's all. Little else I can do at the moment except look more from her or more thoughts about the book. Joy and delight. Although the tale is not all happy, there is a calmness and peace, a fullness. A mental strength. Strength and joy are the carried away emotions. Many things to note down, perhaps if I read it again.  

Knausgaard

Reading Knausgaard. His essays, 'In The Land of the Cyclops'. Again and again when I read him, this about him: the meditative prose. Drawing in, and then plenty of departure points for thoughts to take off. A sort of soothing rhythm of the writing. The sentences keep flowing one after the another, not in a rush, but slowly, quietly. Like his collection, Winter and Autumn. I am yet to read the other two (Spring, Summer). I couldn't take up part three of 'My Struggle'. It felt too close to life, and generally my reading time is also a little bit of reflective time, if it pushes in or plates up the same day-to -day again with all its practical concerns or the surface noise, somehow I get caught up in it and do not find the reflective doors or channels. Just a matter of mood. Sometimes when I am feeling more upbeat, secure, generally on top of world, perhaps I can attempt it. Anyhow, the point was that the essays seem to be at a slight distance. The essay gives a structure, a particular subject which becomes the board from where and to which the discussion keeps coming in and looping out. And all the pleasures of the Knausgaard sentences are there. 

As some writings are like verb, a state, a space of its own, where you not only see what the writer says, but somehow it is so opening, or inviting to open up yourself that you spend a lot of time on the same pages, reading, thinking, imagining. Because there are so many tangents that shoot out of these pages. And one has to, has to trace a few. Those are the delights of any reading, and here, there seem to be heaps. It takes longer to read, but then the time reading those pages is so rich.

I began to read these essays in sequence, but somehow the painting essays didn't hold me so I skipped ahead to ones which have more of a reader in them. And I can read almost anywhere and the prose opens up warmly to hold you. The ones on Northern Lights, the one on Submission, the one called 'Idiots of the Cosmos'... it is not even about the subject but more about the tangents. That what he thinks about the moon, the universe and how perhaps life appears to those living in long days and long nights, that somewhere I too have felt something similar, is one little thing, but that there are things like this spread throughout the book. And each of these is a treasure. One needs to pause and consider it. Contemplate it. See it well from the almost multiple angles it opens...light bouncing off willy nilly from so many angles and surfaces. 

So, keen to keep reading it. And perhaps revisit. Prose like this, which is a state, a verb, less like a book, more an invitation to a show. Or an event everytime one reads those sentences. Delighted.

**

I wrote this a few days ago. Then I got off Knausgaard and haven't found my way back in. Somehow, it is like this with his writing. Quite surrounded by it, and then on consideration, or as it seeps deeper, perhaps what stays is little - that is the thing with writing that is verb. I don't know, somehow when there is too much of a person or a person's surface in their writing, the seeping in process is strange. There is tug, a push and pull between your likes and the person you encounter through this reading. And generally, in such a tug, the generous souls find their way deeper, or people who can do that dance with self and yet not a self - the personal yet the classical, I don't know how to put it. Those who can talk about the self and yet leave the self out of it. Here I have in mind DFW and his generosity. Somehow, as the writing makes it way to deeper levels, it needs to stand by itself, strong in its truth, its largesse, its uplifting or enriching or elevating capacities. 

Perhaps that is why I enjoy Knausgaard while reading him, for all the doors and tangents it opens. But in terms of staying or lingering or the reaching deep, it is just different, it is a lot of surface. It is just the kind of writing, and little to do with the person. The writing which is a theater, a state, verb and then there is writing which can hold its own at all depths. 

Slow reader

This strife with oneself. There seems to be an ocean to be read, and then one's span, or scoop size, a page at a time. When one reads slowly, wanderingly, digressingly, taking off at every suitable departure point for a tangent, one often lands in these conversations with self. About how and what to read. The aspirations are very high, but at the same time, one reads slowly, perhaps a few pages a day. 

One would think that even at that pace, one could read a lot as long as there is discipline. Should the discipline be allowed into the digressions too? I think not. Then perhaps a better question is what is the objective? Is it the number of books or pages or is it the quality of thoughts during the reading time, or where a page of written words can take you? And the funny thing is there is no good way to measure that. Except perhaps a sense of contentment that a few pages are enough. The mind's chasing of numbers, this other conversation about non measurable contentment - it is like holding your own on the beach at the edge of waves coming in and going out, slowly the ground seems to shift, your feet sink and you know not the ground that you stand on. Then you keep reminding yourself of the objective often. That is, shifting your feet in the sand again and again to find firm footing. Reminding yourself again of the bit about contentment. The objective is perhaps that hour or two with words is beautiful, is full of tangents perhaps or a nice story or a deep thought that opens something inside you. This random measure of pages read or books covered, a lifetime is small perhaps to what one would like to read, especially at the slow pace. And not because of that, but because what you read for - sometimes a paragraph is enough, sometimes a page is good. And contentment helps. Else it is a random conversation with self. And you carry on some endless pursuit chasing pages. Perhaps not to read if you see a FOMO creeping up. 

My thoughts at the moment after a particularly random conversation with self. Let's see if this is solid ground or shifting sands. Check on these again sometime soon. And to reflect on the non-measure of a slow reader.

**

When I was younger, the Literature text books were a curated thing, a few essays, short stories, extracts, poems. One was to read everything deeply, over and over again, getting familiar with the text. Then one grows up, and encounters this ocean alone. As in, the whole world and all its books are there. How do you pick? Classics perhaps is one good place to begin. Book Lists. Nobel prize winners. Guidance from other readers perhaps who have read a lot. And then sometimes one likes an author, and tries to read as much from them. The list keeps getting longer. What I perhaps mean to say that the way one read for school, over and over again until the meanings surrender, as they say, it changes as one grows up and reads for pleasure. Still, there are some writings that are like that. That require me to pause, and read again and again, trying to imprint it on my mind, perhaps noting it down on paper, perhaps just reading it again, and yet again. One doesn't move much forward that way, but one reaches a satiety or contentment which somehow chasing numbers doesn't get one.

Perhaps this truce with oneself, that slow reading is perhaps the way to be. That it matters not that there is the ocean out there. A few pearls that find their way to your reading time are plenty. 

It is a learning. A slow process. Something to imbibe. Because time and again I find myself in this conversation with self, about the slowness of my reading and the vastness of the aspiration. 

**

Then this essay found its way to me. 'On reading to oneself' from the Habitations of the word by William H Gass. It can be found here (pg 216). This one is one of those which require rereading often, in the hope that some of it would imprint on the mind.

A sentence that I carry with me - ' to be a paragon of appreciation'. The larger paragraph in which it appears is here below:

But the educated and careful tongue will taste and discriminate this particular stew from every other. Tasting is a dialectical process in which one proceeds from general to specific similarities, but this can be accomplished only through a series of differentiations. Antonymical tasting (which also sounds disgusting) ultimately "identified: this dish, not only as pure stew, but as Brunswick strw, and knows whether it was done in Creole style or not, and then finally it recognizes, in this plater's present version of the recipe, that the squirrels were fat and gray and came from Mississippi where they fed on elderberries and acorns of the swamp oak. One grasps an act, an object, an idea, a sentence, synthetically, simply by feeling or receiving its full effect - in the case of the stew that means its complete, unique taste. I need not be able to name the ingredients; I need not be able to describe how the dish was prepared; but I should be a paragon of appreciation. This quality, because it is the experience of differentiation within a context of comparison, cannot be captured in concepts, cannot be expressed in words. Analytical tasting has a different aim. It desires to discover what went into the dish; it reconstructs the recipe, and recreates the method of its preparation. It moves from effects to causes.

Love the wild swan

One of the other books I'm reading these days is Czeslaw Milosz's A Year of the Hunter. This book is a diary of a year, 1987 Aug - 1988 July. I am still on early pages, now beginning September. 

I just perhaps need to reiterate this thing about a poet's prose. Somehow a poet's sensibility and the relationship with words, metaphors, phrases, sentences is quite something. The economy of the prose, the simplicity yet the depth it can reflect. Like deep, clean, refreshing pool of water. Generally, it is a treat to read prose by poets.

Here's a little paragraph and a poem he refers to from the preface:

There is also another explanation for the title. My youthful dreams of excursions "on the trail of nature" were never fulfilled, and yet I did become a hunter, although of a different sort: my game was the entire visible world and I have devoted my life trying to capture it in words, to making a direct hit with words. Alas, the present year of the hunter brings, in the main, reflections on the incommensurability of aspirations and accomplishments, despite the existence of an entire shelf of books written by me. I repeat to myself a poem by Robinson Jeffers that I translated into Polish a long time ago, and I see more clearly than ever before that I could well have adopted it as the motto for all my creative work:

Love The Wild Swan

"I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunger, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings."
- This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your...self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Here is his Nobel Lecture. His fame he believes is narrow, what he calls "providential equanimity inscribed in my destiny: never too much fame, just the right amount."

Some time back I bought a book of his poems, translated. The poems are yet to find me. But his another collection, a poetry anthology 'A Book of Luminous Things' finds me flipping through its pages often. He has selected poems from all over the world, often translated, and presented across a few key themes. So many poems like the one above. A beautiful selection.

More from 'A Year of the Hunter' if I am able to read through more. 

A General Theory of Oblivion

Read this book at my pen friend’s recommendation. Novel by Jose Eduardo Agualusa. Translated from Portugese. It is about a woman, in Angola, living in an apartment locked out from the world for over thirty years, surviving. 

But perhaps it is also a quiet thank-you note to the simple joys of reading. A reader cannot help but note the sentences of reading-love spread throughout the book. I have collected some, here they are:

On the apartment, the books

Orlando owned a valuable library - thousands of titles, in Portugese, French, Spanish, English and German, among which almost all the great classics of universal literature were to be found. 

The misreading

My weakness, my vanishing eyesight, it means I stumble over letters as I read. I read pages I've read so many times before, but they're different now. I get things wrong, as I read, and in those mistakes, sometimes, I find incredible things that are right.

Further,

If I still had the space, the charcoal, and available walls, I could compose a great work about forgetting: a general theory of oblivion.

I realise I have transformed the entire apartment into a huge book. After burning the library, after I have died, all that remains will be my voice.

The books, burnt

Whenever she wanted to go out she would look for a book in the library. She felt, as she went on burning those books, after having burned all the furniture, the doors, the wooden floor tiles, that she was losing her freedom. It was as though she was incinerating the whole planet. When she burned Jose Amado she stopped being able to visit Ilheus and Sao Salvador. BurningUlysses, by Joyce, she had lost Dublin. Getting rid of Three Trapped Tigers, she incinerated old Havana. There were fewer than a hundred books left. She kept them more out of stubbornness than to make any use of them.

The boy learning to read

Then the boy did the washing-up and put away the crockery. He roamed about the house, curious:

'You know you've got a lot of books.'

'A lot of books? Yes, I did have a lot. There aren't many now.'

'I've never seen so many.'

'Can you read?'

'I'm not very good at putting the letters together. I only did one year at school.'

'Would you like me to teach you? I'll teach you to read and then you can read to me.'

Subalu learned to read while Ludo convalesced.

The doorman

Nasser Evangelista was pleased with his new job. He wore a blue uniform, very clean, and spent most of his time sitting at a desk, reading, while he watched the foor out the corner of his eye. He had developed his taste for reading during the years spent locked up in Sao Paulo prison in Luanda.

...That morning, Nasser Evangelista was rereading, for the seventh time, tge adventures of Robinson Crusoe..

Monte and his retirement

He planned to spend his final years rereading Jorge Amado, Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Luandino Vieira, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The woman, now old:

'My family is this boy, that mulemba tree out there, and a phantom dog. My eyesight gets worse every day... In any case, I don't aspire to any more: the light, Sabalu reading to me, the joy of a pomegranate every day.'

***

Lots about books, and reading.

And just perhaps how nature feels about her human children. So lost in ideas, forgetting the basics. Some sensible advice:

'You can eat better without spending more', she explained to Little Chief. 'You and your friends fill your mouths with big words  - Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution - and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don't feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables, and a good fish broth at least once a week. I'm only interested in the kinds of revolution that starts off by getting people sat at the table.'

***

Another little beauty:

Exorcism

I carve out verses
short
as prayers

words are
legions
of demons
expelled

I cut adverbs
pronouns

I spare my
wrists

***

The book itself didn’t take long to read. In a long while have I read something this quickly. Just a few hours. It reminded me briefly of 2666, Bolano. Just an image.

Brief chapters, interspersed with empty title pages, the chapter titles like a poem running through the book, a lot of breathing space yet keeps you moving quick. Things converge, things so disparate converge… in a set of coincidences that forms the core narrative. But it is not a narrative. Perhaps a brief sketch. Underlying the sketch is a personal tragedy, that doesn’t make itself felt, except perhaps in the eccentricities. I feel that there is still an affirming of life in the book. The argument of to be or not to be is more between memory and forgetting. A general theory of oblivion.

Enjoyed the read.

A sonnet by Keats

Yesterday I came across this sonnet by Keats:

Sonnet VII - O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,

Let it not be among the jumbled heao

Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—

Nature's  observatory—whencethe dell,

Its flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,

May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep

'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap

Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.

But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,

Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,

Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd,

Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be

Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,

When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

Perhaps it means something else in its closing lines, but one can also read it for the sweet converse or a company with books, writers and some good writing. Perhaps.

Les Miserables

Les Miserables has many detours of sorts, or rather pools of reflection at something or the other. Some sort of essays, thought-chains which explore some aspect of Paris, France, the world then. Sometimes, it is about revolutions, at other times, other ideas. I am in the last quarter of the book. When there is so much depth and thinking going on, it is difficult to keep reading quickly. One can do so with dialogues and the story lines, but essays need slower pace. Sharing a beautiful passage I read today, here below. This passage/view from somewhere in the middle of nineteenth century, a view of the world and a hope for the world to come. 

"...And what revolution are we going to bring about? I just told you: the revolution of the True. From the political standpoint, there is only one principle: the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty I have over myself is known as Liberty. Wherever two or more such sovereignties gather together, the State begins. But in this gathering together, there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a certain portion of itself to form the common right. This portion is the same for all. The identical nature of the concession that each makes to all is known as Equality. Common right is nothing more nor less than the protection of all shining on the right of each. This protection of all over each is known as Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these aggregate sovereignties is known as Society. This intersection being a junction, the point is a node. Hence what is known as the social bond. Some say social contract; which is the same thing, the word contract being etymologically formed by the notion of a bond. Let's understand each other in regard to equality; for if liberty is the high point, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not the levelling of all the vegetation, a society of tall blades of grass and short oak trees, a community of envies leaping at each other's throats; it is, in civic terms, all aptitudes having the same opportunity; in political terms, all votes having the same weight; in religious terms, all consciences having the same right. Equality has an organ: free and compulsory education. The right to the alphabet - that's where we have to start. Primary school imposed on everyone, secondary school offered to everyone - that's the rule. From the school that is identical springs the equal society. Yes, education! Light! Light! Everything comes from light and everything comes down to it. Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then there will be nothing left of the old history; there will be no more fear, like there is today, of conquest, invasion, usurpation, rivalry between nations by force of arms, civilizations interrupted by some marriage of kings, a birth in the hereditary tyrannies, the division of nations by congress, dismemberment through the downfall of some dynasty, some battle between two religions going head to head, like two billy goats in the shadows, on the bridge of the infinite; they will not have to fear any more famine, exploitation, prostitution caused by distress, misery casued by unemployment, and the scaffold, and the blade, and battles and all the armed robberies casued by chance in the forest of events. People will be happy. The human race will live upto its law, just as the terrestrial globe lives up to its law; harmony will be reestablished between the soul and the star. The soul will gravitate around the truth, just as the star does around the light. Friends, the moment we have reached, this moment in which I am speaking to you, is a sombre moment; but this is the terrible price the future extracts. A revolution is a tollgate. Oh, the human race will be delivered, lifted up and consoled! We swear to it on this barricade. Where will the cry of love go up from if not from the height of sacrifice? O, my brothers, this is the very spot where those who think and those who suffer come together as one; this barricade is not made of cobblestones, or wooden beams, or scrap iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas and a heap of pain. Misery meets the ideal here. The day embraces the night here and says to it: I am going to die with you and you will be born again with me. From this embracing of all sorrows springs faith. Suffering brings its agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are going to mingle and compose our death. Brother, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we will enter a grave entirely lit up by dawn."

Perhaps a linking thought is that people seem to do the best from that is in front of them (building on K's idea). One can regard one's place in history, but there is little one can do about it. One can just play the road, do the next thing that seems like the best option. And with these steps, one by one, what we call the narrative of history is shaped. 

But we often tend to forget of the way the world has been shaped. We live in the present with its good and bad, and forget how the world has changed, and evolved. And each step forward brings its own issues, yet, from the times - isn't it a better world for more people? Perhaps. While living in some sort of history, one cannot say much about anything, it is a moving thing, difficult to be a good judge. But it would be wanting on our part not to appreciate the way the world is today, not for everyone, but perhaps more people than ever before live in basic comfort and access never ever witnessed by perhaps even the kings of prior times. And yet, if one just takes a glance at sustainable development goals, and the inequality, our age has its own big battles to fight - from access to water to a freedom of being. And then after all this, after everything, after all this talk about progress, access, one wonders whether we have got the map itself wrong - when one looks at the malaise & some sort of mediocrity and an emptiness that excessive comfort breeds. 

But these are conjectures. As noted above, one or an age perhaps does what seems like the best option at that point, and although hindsight loves  to weave everything as a narrative or rationale, it is not a narrative, neither a rationale. Every point in time has its own decision matrix which other times cannot judge well. We can perhaps just be grateful for the deeds of the great people of any time. The shoulders of giants, as they say. 

A poem

Today brought this poem by Czeslaw Milosz. 

Secretaries

I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing
That is dictated to me and a few others.
Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth
Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle
Or ending it with a comma. And how it all looks when completed
Is not up to us to inquire, we won't read it anyway.

Another of his poem has this phrase :  if not I, then someone else/ Would be walking here, trying to understand his age.

My current read

Since I take weeks/months sometimes to read some books, and since I also wish to keep adding to this page here, I've thought I'll perhaps share a little bit more about what goes on in my reading space. 

I am currently reading Les Miserables. I began sometime in June after finishing Moby Dick, which still sits close, opened sometimes to just get back the flavor of that language and poetry. Les Miserables (I heard someone call it LesMis on a TV show), is a long book. It has 48 mini books in it. I am somewhere beyond midway. Yesterday, I happened on a beautiful page - a diary extract which a person leaves for another person to read. It is something worth noting from. Some passages here below. 

But before getting into that, a little bit more about the book. It has that similar high energy throughout which some long books have with a slowly building and unfolding narrative. And then there are those sections, won't call them detours but these essay like chapters or books which take you out of the story into something else - be it the June 18th battle of Waterloo, or the mechanisms of a convent, or just Paris of early 19th century. A lot of instances like that which help in making the book come alive - or the time and space it is set in come alive. I am enjoying reading it, and although part of me that keeps pace and looks at the bookmark against the closed book for progress wishes to read quickly, part of me wants to take the passages slowly, specially some chapters which revive the time and place, and just how people lived then. Still a few hundred pages to go. 

This book is a new translation by Julie Rose from 2008. 

Other few explorations include Margaret Atwood's Curious Pursuits. There are a few others, but more another time. Now to the passages from Les Miserables which I wish to copy, - echoes of Sufi thought:  

The reduction of the universe to one single being, the expansion of one single being into God: That is what love is.


Love is the angels' greeting to the stars.


God is behind all things, but all things hide God. Things are black, human beings opaque. To love someone is to make them transparent.


Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the body's position, the soul is on its knees.


Lovers who are separated cheat absence by a thousand chimeras that, nonetheless, have their reality. They are prevented from seeing each other, they can't write to each other, yet they find a whole host of mysterious ways of communicating. They send each other birdsong, the perfume of flowers, the laughter of children, the sun's rays, the wind's sighs, starlight, all of Creation. And why not? All God's works are made to serve love. Love is powerful enough to load the whole of nature with its messages.
O spring, you are the letter I write to her.


The future belongs even more to hearts than to minds. Loving is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible.


Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like the soul, it is a divine spark, like the soul, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that is inside us, that is everlasting and infinite, that nothing can limit and that nothing can extinguish. You feel it burn right to the marrow of your bones and you see it shine out to the back of the sky.


O love! Adoration! Sensual joy of two minds that understand each other, of two hearts that are exchanged, of two glances that pierce each other through!...I have sometimes dreamed that now and then the hours broke away from the life of the angels and came down here below to traverse the destiny of men.


...God is the fullness of heaven; love is the fullness of mankind.


When love has melted and blended two beings in an angelic and sacred unity, the secret of life is open to them; they are nothing more, then, than the two sides of a single destiny; they are nothing more than the two wings of a single spirit. Love, soar!


Deep hearts, wise spirits, take life the way God made it. It is a long ordeal, an unintelligible preparation for an unknown destiny. ...Try to love souls and you will find them again.


What a great thing, to be loved! What an even greater thing, to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer made up of anything but what is pure; it no longer relies on anything but what is elevated and grand. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene soul, out of reach of vulgar passions and emotions, rises above the clouds and shadows of this world, the follies, the lies, the hatreds, the vanities, the miseries, and inhabits the endless skies and feels only the deep and subterranean rumblings of destiny, as the mountain peak feels earthquakes.


If there wasn't someone who loved, the sun would go out.

'Intrepid effort of the soul'

Over the last couple of years I have read a handful of books perhaps. Some of them were long books and took me long weeks, if not months. Most recent was Moby Dick. 

Moby Dick was a surprisingly rewarding reading experience. Surprising, because it is one of those books one has often heard about, but the reading of it was completely different from any of the heard instances. It was a refreshingly fun, some sort of live-wire energy flowing through it. 

Everything about the book was delightful - the language, its poetry, the tone, the intonations, the subject matter or the main preoccupation of the narrator, the world it describes. And then, add to it a series of essays interwoven in the narrative. I call it a series of essays because each one begins anew and afresh - and opens up a new world for you, again and again. Each one has that fresh energy. And then throughout the book are fabulous passages one wishes to share with the world, or take the people around you by hand and make them read those passages. Usually such fabuolous, deep writing tends to be about life and philosophy interwoven with the narrative or the story - layered and deep - what I perhaps mean to say is that the quality of the writing or the richness is because of the writer's thoughts interspersed throughout the book which shed a unique light on life and world, and in that, connect to something deep within the reader – to bring home to reader’s own life and world. 

In their keenness to share an entirety with you, a world with you, they provide a resting pace to the reader. There is no clamor for the reader's attention - there is just a giving, a sharing of the world of writer's mind. Here that mind is on the surface occupied with Moby Dick and whaling. But that is just the surface. All the talk about whales and people on the boat seems just like the top layer of some  deeper philosophical thought. I say philosophical – the word stands in for anything that connects deeply to the life and world of the reader irrespective of whales, boats or the life one leads. It addresses that deep wonder and question which as humanity we all share consciously or unconsciously at some level, about life, its meanings, its context in this universe, and just how to go about living well, if that provide some meaning. 

Books like these have a richness of a whole world in them, and seem to keep on giving on every reading.  Every encounter is a new encounter – the richness of language, the freshness, the depth. I’ll probably be surprised and delighted afresh on meeting those lines.  And I think of Infinite Jest and the generosity of DFW. I think of War and Peace. Or how I felt after closing Don Quixote. Joys of good writing! 

To anyone who has not read it, and who enjoys reading fiction, this is a book worth spending slow hours on. And to close this post, here sharing Chapter 23 in its brief entirety:

The Lee Shore.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Tradition and the individual talent

Seamus Heaney in his 'Finders Keepers' talks lovingly and reverentially of T S Eliot. Reminded and inspired, I too spend my hours with Eliot's Collected Poems. And the desire and need to read more from and about Eliot. Looking up 'Joy of Reading', Charles Von Doren suggests reading certain poems and prose by Eliot, esp "Tradition and the Individual Talent". This can be found in 'The Sacred Wood'.Here. 

This essay prompts its own response. A simple one, that is noting this down some lines this post and perhaps reviving this blog.

Some lines from the essay:

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. 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 44call nearly indispensable to anyone 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. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; 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; 45and 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.

Reading this, a tangential response. From my narrow point of view, this, that considering an artist or writer in a historical chain, is perhaps one way to consider the whole thing. Perhaps other way to look at it is that all great writing resonates with a few simple truths that shine through them in myriad details and complexities. Perhaps there are a few simple truths to begin with, and each great writer discovers again and again the same fountain that feeds all spirit. 

Eliot puts it beautifully in four quartets:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The other problem or conundrum or curiosity or existential matter that he seems to grapple with which finds voice in his poems too is the intersection of temporal with the timeless. A beautiful poem seems to create a timeless space in our temporality. Perhaps the good fortune of finding timelessness in temporality - is the good fortune of any reader.

And again, from Four Quartets:

...But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint—

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. ...

 And further:

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

**

Unrelated note. Some books, essays or poems are like verbs. While reading, they seem to create a space which one seems to enter, a state, just the way the words have been threaded together by the poet or the writer. After reading, I don’t seem to remember a lot from them except perhaps sharpening of a sense or some feeling stays which is enveloping. Like a verb then - it is in the act of reading them - the state of reading, rather than any retention of what is read. Perhaps one changes while reading them rather than carry away words from them. As Eliot would perhaps say, the husk of meaning, in changing, fulfilling. If some writings behave like verbs, perhaps Eliot's poems are an atmosphere of their own. 

**

Back to the blog. I hope to read with same verve the crumbs of great writing that come my way; my personal desires are still the same, to prolong my time with such crumbs, by reading on them, around them, about them: the joys and delights of good writing. And hopefully sharing it here. To any kindred with kindled.

Adam and Eve

I recently read Mark Twain's Extracts from Diaries of Adam and Eve, and it is a delightful and fun short read. I got nudged to the book from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Wave in the mind"  - her book about herself, reading and writing. There is a foreword of sorts to these diaries and so glad that I found them online and read them through. Available here:  Eve's Diary, extracts from Adam's Diary

There are many tangents one can launch (for example, Eve considering herself an experiment), but something I remember it by, is the closing note, Adam at Eve's grave:

"ADAM: Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden."

And then here's something that summarises the vein in which these diaries are written, how the author regards Adam and Eve, here's an extract from Adam's diary: 

Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space—none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature—lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.

Both Adam and Eve change and grow in their diaries, and over time, their regard for each other grows as well culminating in that final quote by Adam on Eve and Eden. 

Reading this and thinking, that Adam and Eve, are quite singular characters with no precedents, no one to learn from but each other. They provide such a large imaginary ground to artists. 

That led me to think about where all I have read them referred to in books or poems. So here is opening a list of where I have come across them (this list is quite short at the moment :), will add to this as I come across/ remember more.

• Milton's Paradise Lost
• Diaries of Adam and Eve (links above)
• Robert Frost poem - Never again would birds' song be the same
• This poem on Eve and Serpent - Paul Valery 
• 
  

A wholly new start

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.