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."

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

The Story Expresses Universal Conflicts Within Human Beings....Adam and Eve

John Gray writes on September 9 2017:
"...Throughout much of its long life, the story of Adam and Eve was understood to be a myth – and myths can have many meanings. Third- and fourth-century Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi in Egypt portray Eve – later condemned for staining all humankind with original sin – as the hero of the story, wiser and more courageous than Adam, while showing the serpent as a liberator offering the first humans freedom from the rule of a jealous God....

...What is most striking about the story is its capacity to express contradictory attitudes to the experience of being human. This is not because those who have told and retold it have been confused. The story expresses universal conflicts within human beings, rendered into a vernacular language of monotheism. The power of this inexhaustible myth comes from it not having any univocal meaning. Yet in recent times the Genesis story has come to be regarded as an erroneous theory of human origins invented before humanity received the modern scientific revelation. Reviving a simple-minded 19th-century philosophy, contemporary campaigners against religion dismiss the Genesis story along with all other myths as rudimentary exercises in scientific theorising....

...The claim to be based in science is one of the defining features of modern myths. After the collapse of European imperial power, the pseudo-Darwinian mythology that propped up colonialism fell into disrepute. But it was soon followed by other myths claiming a basis in social science. A progressive mythology developed that viewed racism and imperialism as exclusively Western vices and the flaws and conflicts of post-colonial states entirely as consequences of colonial rule. These myths were channelled through theories of modernisation, which posited a future fundamentally different from anything that existed in the past.

Like the story of Adam and Eve in Christian orthodoxy, modern myths claim to be objective truths. If we read the story as it was read in subtler times by scholars such as Philo, however, it teaches us that human beings become myth-makers when the increase of knowledge threatens to thwart their need for meaning. If science reveals a world without any overarching purpose or direction – as Darwin’s theory of natural selection does – science is distorted to promote a vision of evolution that satisfies the demand for narrative coherence.

This is what happened when Darwinism was appropriated by racists, and later by humanists such as Julian Huxley who reinterpreted the aimless process of evolution as the spiralling advance of intelligence in the cosmos.

With their babble about a godlike humanity taking charge of its future evolution, today’s campaigners against religion do much the same. Since living without myths is unendurable, these rationalists cover themselves with fig leaves of cod-science, close their eyes and return to a state of happy blindness. As part of its unfathomable richness, the story of Adam and Eve reveals the nature of myth itself"


Artist: Lucas Cranach (1472-1663),  'Adam and Eve', 1526

Geoff Dyer has an interesting take on this picture:
"...It could be a nice picture – if the wily serpent and the people were removed. The artist Pavel Maria Smejkal did something like this in his series Fatescapes, digitally erasing the defining events from famous photographs by Capa and others so that there was just the innocent background. Do that here and we get a kind of flash-forward to the way that Eden will look after A and E have been shown the door...."
(The Guardian, September 2011)

“Which is better—to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and get kicked out or to stick around here with nothing to talk about?” 

Artist: Tom Toro, The New Yorker, December 2016

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