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."

Monday, March 23, 2026

Aristotle in Exile

Edith Hall, 'Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me', 2024:

"...And what a different example was set by Socrates’ student Aristotle, who died in exile from his chosen homeland of Athens! (He was originally from northern Greece.) Aristotle’s denial that the gods interested themselves in human affairs and his scientific approach to the world made him vulnerable to prosecution on religious grounds. Once his former student Alexander the Great was dead, the Macedonians’ enemies in Athens seized their opportunity and charged Aristotle with impiety, the same crime for which Socrates had been prosecuted eight decades previously. But Aristotle did not court execution and martyrdom as Socrates had done.

In his early sixties, Aristotle was suffering from a serious stomach complaint, probably cancer, but he was not a man to give up on life. He took refuge on the estate belonging to his mother’s family in Chalcis, on the island of Euboea. His companion Herpyllis, mother of his son Nicomachus, accompanied him. Aristotle died there in 322 BCE. He must have been anxious, and he must desperately have missed the life of the Lyceum (the Athenian institute for advanced study he had founded) and the friendship of his confidant and colleague Theophrastus, whom he had left in charge.

But the move to Chalcis provided Aristotle with a beautiful home, complete with garden and guest house, in which to prepare for the death his medical knowledge as a doctor’s son probably led him to expect. He derived emotional sustenance from reading literary works: in one moving fragment, written toward the end of his life, he says that he enjoys the old myths increasingly “the older and more isolated I become.” And Chalcis was and still is a healthful, breezy seaside town. It is cheering to think that in his final illness, Aristotle would have taken his last walks along the long sunny promenade, perhaps with Herpyllis and his children, Nicomachus and Pythias, to discuss how best to face the prospect of his death and their future without him. Grief when a much-loved person dies is the worst emotional pain most humans undergo, and it is worth preparing ourselves for it. By choosing exile over execution, Aristotle ensured that his family knew how hard it was for him to leave them...."

ChatGPT imagined Aristotle would have taken his last walks along the long sunny promenade, perhaps with Herpyllis and his children, Nicomachus and Pythias, 

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