मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Not with a Whimper but a Bang

T S Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men” in 1925.

The poem ends with following much quoted and copied words:

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

This blog has already visited starless sky on October 2, 2007. Read it here
I Should Learn to Look at an Empty Sky unless……..

(Please note I took some liberties with that post because “What will the scientists of the future see as they peer into the skies 100 billion years from now? Without telescopes, they will see pretty much what we see today: the stars of our galaxy. The largest and brightest stars will have burned up their nuclear fuel, but plenty of smaller stars will still light up the night sky. The big difference will occur when these future scientists build telescopes capable of detecting galaxies outside our own. They won’t see any!”)

Scientific American India March 2008 has cover story: “The End of Cosmology”.

Authors Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer claim:
“…Thus, observers of the future are likely to predict that the universe ultimately ends with a localized big crunch, rather than the eternal expansion that the cosmological constant produces. Instead of a whimper, their limited universe will end with a bang…”

Ironically, according to Wikipedia, when asked if he would write these lines again, Eliot said ‘no’:

“One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone's mind. Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either…”



100 billion years in the future |
Successor to the Milky Way is a ball-like supergalaxy. Earth floats forlornly through its distant outskirts. Other galaxies, moving away from us faster than light, have disappeared from view.

Picture courtesy: Scientific American
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