मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, September 11, 2014

विनोबा भावे: सर्वच फार लहान वाटले...When Life is An Affair of Places

Today September 11 2014 is 119th Birth Anniversary of Vinoba Bhave (विनोबा भावे)

Wallace Stevens, Adagia:


“Life is an affair of people not of places. but for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.”

G. K. Chesterton has said : "There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place..."

What if one takes the second way?

Vinoba and Orwell did that. This is what they had to say:

 Vinoba Bhave  (1895-1982), 'जीवन-गाथा', 'ज्ञान ते सांगतो पुन्हा', 2004/2006 :

"...गावात एक मोठा तलाव होता. त्या तलावा  जवळ एक उंच झाड व एक मोठे मंदिर होते. खूप वर्षानंतर जवळजवळ चाळीस वर्षानंतर मला पुन्हा गागोदे गावी जाण्याचा योग आला तेव्हा ते मंदिर, झाड, तलाव सर्वच फार लहान वाटले. तलाव इतका लहान की एका तीरावरून पलीकडील तीरावर दगड फेकणे शक्य होते. झाड इतके लहान की सहज त्यावर चढता येईल. पण बालपणी आपल्या दृष्टीला हे सर्व खूप मोठे दिसत असते .."

(...there was a large lake in the town. Near the lake there was a tall tree and a big temple. After many years almost forty years I happened to go to Gagode. Then the temple, the tree, the lake all were felt to be very small. Lake so small that it was possible to throw a stone from one bank to the other. Tree so small that it could be climbed easily. But during the childhood all this looked big to our eyesight...)


George Orwell (1903-1950). '‘Such, Such Were The Joys’, c 1947:

"...If I had to pass through Eastbourn I would not make a detour to avoid the school: and if I happened to pass the school itself I might even stop for a moment by the low brick wall, with the steep bank running down from it, and look across the flat playing field at the ugly building with the square of asphalt in front of it. And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!..."


Artist: Whitney Darrow,Jr. ,  The New Yorker,  17 July 1948

Not so high when you return as a grown man, kid

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