Howard Jacobson:
"The novelist, at his
swelling comic best – a Dickens or a Dostoevsky, a Cervantes or a Kafka, a
Joseph Roth or a Henry Miller – goes where Hamlet dares the skull of Yorick to
go, straight to my painted lady's chamber, rattling his bones and making her
laugh at the terrible fate that awaits her. His comedy spares nothing and
spares no one. And in the process asserts the stubbornness of life. Why would
we want to read anything less?"
I first read this famous Marathi poem of Vinda Karandikar (विंदा करंदीकर) probably in 1974. It ends thus:
"'देणाऱ्याने देत जावे, घेणाऱ्याने घेत जावे,
घेता घेता एक दिवस देणाऱ्याचे हात घ्यावेत'"
I thought it was interesting- this dance of giving and receiving-, a bit startling but in the end straight forward. I was ready to answer any question on it in an examination.
Henry Miller on the Beautiful Osmosis of Giving and Receiving:
"...I, who have been helped so much by others, I ought to know something of the duties of the receiver. It’s so much easier to be on the giving side. To receive is much harder — one actually has to be more delicate, if I may say so. One has to help people to be more generous. By receiving from others, by letting them help you, you really aid them to become bigger, more generous, more magnanimous. You do them a service.
And then finally, no one likes to do either one or the other alone. We all try to give and take, to the best of our powers. It’s only because giving is so much associated with material things that receiving looks bad. It would be a terrible calamity for the world if we eliminated the beggar. The beggar is just as important in the scheme of things as the giver. If begging were ever eliminated God help us if there should no longer be a need to appeal to some other human being, to make him give of his riches. Of what good abundance then? Must we not become strong in order to help, rich in order to give and so on? How will these fundamental aspects of life ever change?.."
(1942, from 'The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944')
