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, October 08, 2018

सर्वपित्री अमावस्या...Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come

आज भाद्रपद कृ १४, शके १९४०, सर्वपित्री अमावस्या.


Norman  Cohn, ‘Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith’, 1993
“.....The Rig Veda has nothing to say about the common people -naturally enough, since it was composed by and for members of the privileged strata of society. To the privileged it offers a most agreeable prospect. Provided only that they had honoured the gods and made the proper ritual offerings, had been generous to the priests and fulfilled their proper functions in the world, such people had no cause to worry about the netherworld. On the contrary, they could look forward to an afterlife as happy as that which awaited the most fortunate members of Egyptian society.
Vedic Indians believed that each such individual had a spirit - an impalpable substance, like a breath. But though the spirit was distinct from the body, it did not desert it for ever at the moment of death. At death the spirit made its way to heaven, easily and pleasantly - and once arrived there it met its body again. Not even cremation could prevent that: so long as the corpse had not been injured by bird or beast, and the bones had been collected afterwards and correctly arranged, the whole body was reconstituted in the next world, ready for the spirit to re-enter. Then life was resumed.
The dead continued their lives in heaven, where they dwelt with the Fathers - the dead who had gone before them - and with Yama, the first man and therefore the first to die. Now he reigned, rather than ruled, in heaven. That blissful realm is repeatedly described in the Rig Veda: it is full of radiant light, and of harmony and joy. Its denizens are nourished on milk and honey and of course soma. They make love - all the more deliciously because they have been freed from every bodily defect. The sound of sweet singing and of the flute is readily available. There are even wishcows, which supply whatever is wished for. In short, the afterlife of the fortunate minority would be a much improved version of the life they had lived on earth - a life, too, that would be free, at last and for ever, from harassment by the restless agents of chaos.
But none of this had any bearing on the future of the world itself....”


 
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