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, June 04, 2024

100 Years of A Passage to India: How India Showed E. M. Forster Another Way of Looking at Life

Nigel Collett, “Developing the Heart: E. M. Forster and India”, 2022:

“…Politically, the novel is a criticism of the British Raj, whose functionaries and their wives are uniformly portrayed as failing to understand, and mostly not wanting to understand, those they govern. The flawed relationships between rulers and ruled create the impossibility of friendship between the two and place insurmountable difficulties in the path of any man or woman brave enough to defy convention by reaching out the hand of friendship. It is clear from his earlier denial that Forster had intended a serious purpose in writing the novel — he had wanted it to build a bridge between the nations. That he no longer thought such a bridge possible was one of the factors that deadened his impulse to complete the book.

The novel is also about the confusions of a young life awakening to awareness of sex and love, and failing badly to cope. Through the character of Miss Adela Quested, who finds more in “the real India” than she had ever imagined, Forster examines the mystery of the passage from innocence to awareness. Permeating the book are Forster’s hymns to friendship and to India, the country he loved…”

Jacqueline Banerjee, ‘Abundant vitality: How India showed E. M. Forster another way of looking at life’, TLS, August 5 2022:

“…Collett’s thorough research enables him to find many correspondences between Forster’s experience of the subcontinent and A Passage to India, showing, for example, how his state of mind when visiting the Barabar Caves, near Gaya in Bihar, is reflected in the Marabar Caves episode in the novel. But what makes this book so rewarding is the bigger picture – of how a rather timid, repressed youth was, as he put it, shaken out of his “narrow and academic suburban outlook” and introduced to “another way of looking at life”, becoming, in the process, a man at ease among every rank and caste. In return, as Collett shows in new detail, he did much to convey India’s abundant vitality to an uncomprehending West. His broadcasts and contacts in later life helped him to repay the debt of which he was so keenly aware. Enabling leading Indian novelists such as Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali to find their audience abroad was another part of Forster’s achievement…”

E. M. Forster, “A Passage to India”, 1924:

“…MOST of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,” or, “I am horrified,” we are insincere. “As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror”—it’s no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent…”


 cover artist: David Gentleman (1930-)

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