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."

Saturday, October 01, 2022

Immense Panorama of Futility and Anarchy...Thirsting for Redemption and Renewal...The Waste Land@100

Michiko Kakutani, ‘Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread’, 2020:

“…After decades of being taught in high school and college, after its innovations have been widely assimilated, imitated, and satirized, The Waste Land might now strike some readers as familiar, even trite. It’s hard to appreciate just how radical it was when it was first published, breaking old rules of prosody and using new language and techniques to tackle what were then unfashionable themes of spiritual alienation and urban malaise.

But reread today, the poem’s evocation of the broken world left in the wake of World War I remains remarkably resonant. It depicts a world in which the old rules and certainties have vanished—a spiritual desert where “the dead tree gives no shelter,” where lonely people move numbly through an “Unreal City,” where the poet “can connect / Nothing with nothing.”

Eliot once observed that the poem was written as “the relief of a personal…grouse against life,” and it was, in part, a reflection of his own state of mind as he struggled with a miserable marriage and a nervous breakdown. But much the way that Kafka’s work, which was rooted in his relationship with a domineering father, yielded lasting metaphors for modern life and politics, so did Eliot’s Waste Land mirror larger dynamics in the world. It’s a world not unlike our own, haunted by a sense of loss and dislocation—a world, to use words written by Eliot in an essay about Ulysses, that presented an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” while thirsting for redemption and renewal.”

Robert Crawford, 'Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land', 2015:

“…It was 15 December when The Waste Land became an American book. One thousand copies were printed, each stamped with an individual number, published from 105 W. 40th Street, New York. Hard at work assembling the contents for the next few issues of the Criterion, Tom opened the small, pale-jacketed volume in his London flat. Slightly heavier than it looked, underneath the dust jacket it was bound in black boards with only the words THE WASTE LAND in gold on the front board. Inside, the poem now carried its Latin and Greek epigraph (though no dedication), and was printed in large type – never more than sixteen lines of poetry per page. Thanks to this generous spacing and to the added prose ballast of the Notes, it managed to fill sixty-four pages. Throughout, the verse carried line numbers (one every ten lines), as if to bind together a work that kept threatening to explode into separate shards. The inside front-jacket flap quoted an early review by Burton Rascoe in the New York Tribune, calling The Waste Land ‘a thing of bitterness and beauty’ and, ‘perhaps, the finest poem of this generation’. The note on the rear flap began simply, ‘T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri’, then went on to hail him as ‘without question the most significant of the younger American writers’. Tom, weary and very far from the city of his birth, looked at the name ‘T. S. Eliot’ in plain black print on the title page.

It was as if he had never been young.”