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

Saturday, August 24, 2024

The Vast Majority of Humans Today have Never Seen an Unpolluted, Natural Night Sky

 तारारूपाणि यानीह दृश्यन्ते द्युतिमन्ति वै । दीपवद् विप्रकृष्टत्वादणूनि सुमहान्त्यपि ॥३.४३.३०॥  (महाभारत, आरण्यकपर्व) " The luminous stars, thought really very large, appear small and twinkle like lamps on account of their great distance. "

लहानपणी मिरजेला अनेक वेळा घरासमोरील त्यावेळी कमी रहदारी असलेल्या रस्त्यात रात्र पडल्यावर बसत असू (आम्हाला अंगण आणि गच्ची नव्हते) आणि साहजिकच नजर वरती जाऊन चंद्राची अनेक रूपे , चांदण्या पहिल्या आहेत... चंद्र अगदी घरचा वाटे... त्याच्या पृष्ठभागावर कल्पना करू ती गोष्ट दिसत असे... हरीण, ससा वगैरे... आता आकाशाकडे केंव्हातरी पाहतो... 

Rebecca Boyle reviewing "Starborn: How the Stars Made Us (and Who We Would Be Without Them)" By Roberto Trotta, 2024 for WSJ:

"...The vast majority of humans today have never seen an unpolluted, natural night sky. They have never seen the gauzy stripe of the Milky Way arcing overhead on a summer evening, the fuzz of the Andromeda Galaxy, the faint stars that fill in the empty space between the brightest constellations. It is a great paradox of our age that even as the night sky is screened by a haze of artificial lighting, the glowing rectangles we hold in our palms can bring us to the edges of the universe. As Mr. Trotta artfully puts it: “The pixelized ghosts of photons that chanced to fall onto the mirrors of our giant telescopes after a few billion years’ journey through space are served up from the cloud in an instant.”..."

Stars over Biwa Lake, by Shoda Koho, 1930

 

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