अश्वमेध...Yudhisthira, Nietzsche and Schrödinger

Sue Prideaux :

“…It is not clear what exactly happened on the morning of 3 January 1889. The story is they saw him as usual leaving Davide Fino’s corner house on the Piazza Carlo Alberto. They were used to the sad and solitary figure wrapped in thought, often on his way to the bookshop, where he was known to sit for hours with the book pressed very close to his face, reading but never making a purchase. The piazza was full of tired old horses drooping between the traces of carts and cabs waiting for fares: miserable jut-ribbed nags being tormented into some semblance of work by their masters. On seeing a cabbie mercilessly beating his horse, Nietzsche broke down. Overwhelmed by compassion, sobbing at the sight of it, he threw his arms protectively around the horse’s neck, and collapsed. Or so they said. Crises are so quickly come and gone. Eyewitnesses see so many different truths….”

(‘THE CAVE MINOTAUR ·’, “I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche”, 2018)

Benjamín Labatut :

“…The streets of Vienna filled with mutilated soldiers who had brought back with them the spectres of the battlefield; their nerves, damaged by gas in the trenches, twisted their faces into ghoulish grimaces, spasms shook their muscles, rattling the medals that hung from their tattered uniforms and making them chime like the bells in a leper colony. Control of the population was left in the hands of an army whose soldiers were as weak and famished as those they were meant to govern; fat white maggots infested their rations of meat, less than a hundred grams per person per day. When the troops distributed what little foodstuffs arrived in their country from Germany, total chaos ensued: during one of the disturbances, Schrödinger watched the mob knock a policeman from his horse. In five minutes, the beast was dismembered by a hundred women, who flocked around the cadaver to tear away the very last strips of its flesh….”

(“When We Cease to Understand the World”, 2020)

Ashwamedha yagna of Yudhisthira By Mughal artist - From Birla Razmnama (courtesy: Wikipedia)