इरावती कर्वे यांची दोन दर्शने : दुर्गाबाई आणि पुल....Irawati Karve - Two Perspectives by Durga Bhagwat, Pu La Deshpande

२०१८साली मला पुलंची खालील पुस्तके आवडतात: 
तुझे आहे तुजपाशी १९५७, नस्ती उठाठेव १९५२, रवींद्रनाथ : तीन व्याख्याने १९८० आणि गुण गाईन आवडी १९७५.

'गु. गा. आ.'  मधील काही लेख माझ्यासाठी मी कोणत्याही भाषेत वाचलेल्या सर्वोत्कृष्ट लेखांपैकी आहेत- उदा वसंत पवार, वसंतराव देशपांडें, कुमार गंधर्व यांच्या वरील लेख. वसंत पवारांना पुल काहीकाळासाठी अक्षरशः जिवंत करतात. महाराष्ट्राची संगीतातील श्रीमंती आपल्याला अशा लेखांतून जाणवते.

 पण मला त्यांचा इरावती कर्वेंवरचा लेख अजिबात आवडला नाही. अगदी उथळ वाटला.

आणि त्याच्या उलट इरावती कर्वेंवरचा दुर्गा भागवतांचा लेख. पुलंचा सामान्य लेख जिथे संपतो तिथे दुर्गाबाईंचा सुरु होतो. पुल जी उंची त्यांच्या वर उल्लेखिलेल्या चांगल्या लेखात गाठतात ती दुर्गाबाई ह्या लेखात गाठतात.

मला ह्या गोष्टीच वाईट वाटत आलय की गुणग्राहक पुलंनी दुर्गाबाईंच्या महानतेबद्दल विस्ताराने लिहल नाही. विलास सारंगांनी विस्ताराने केलेले दुर्गाबाईंचे कौतुक वाचल्यानंतर हे शल्य वाढलय.

 दुर्गाबाई ह्या माझ्यामते २०व्या शतकातील सर्वोत्तम मराठी लेखक (आणि जगातील सर्वोत्कृष्टांमध्ये एक) होत्या. त्यांचे गुणवर्णन करून आपण आपली उंची वाढवत असतो. 

डावीकडली पान : "आठवले तसे", १९९१ , कृतज्ञता : दुर्गाबाईंच्या साहित्याचे कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स
उजवीकडील पान : गुण गाईन आवडी, कृतज्ञता: मौज प्रकाशन आणि पुलंच्या साहित्याचे कॉपीराईट होल्डर्स

Like Kilroy, William Faulkner Too Was Here....

#WilliamFaulkner125
 
William Faulkner turns 125 today, September 25 2022


 “Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream....


...The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.” —

 

Youth Drawings (1916-1925)

Artist: William Faulkner

Simply To See...

 John Gray, “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals”:

 “SIMPLY TO SEE: Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?”

 

illustration for "House And Garden" magazine, 1925 by  André Édouard Marty (1882 - 1974)

 

Sophia Loren@88

#SophiaLoren88

गिब्सन गर्ल आणि दीनानाथ सुंदरी...Charles Dana Gibson and Dinanath Dalal

Gibson Girl represents the fashion image for American women between the years 1890 and 1910 approximately. Her name is due to illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, whose cartoons in magazines and other publications of the time showed a stylized and aristocratic type of girl who became the aesthetic pattern to follow.

The Gibson Girls represented an elegant, sophisticated, well-mannered woman with a certain ′′ independence ". Her image should be slender, but with voluptuous shapes accentuated by the corset (hourglass figure), and they used their long hair collected in the bulky hairstyles. They are considered the first ideal of American female beauty.

 

ह्याच धर्तीवर मी "दीनानाथ सुंदरी" तयार केली.  

जेंव्हा मन रेंगाळते आणि शरीर धाव घेते.... Marion Fayolle’s Wordless Narratives

 

Artist: Marion Fayolle

Life of Doctors Before Stethoscope!

 

Yvette Guilbert 1865-1944

George Bernard Shaw:

"....And I was not at all deceived in my expectancy. It amuses her to tell interviewers that she cannot sing, and has no gestures ; but I need not say that there would be very little fun for her in that if she were not one of the best singers and pantomimists in Europe. She divided her programme into three parts : Ironic songs, Dramatic songs, and but perhaps I had better use the French heading here, and say ' Chansons Legeres.' For though Mile. Guilbert sings the hymns of a very ancient faith, profusely....

.....Technically Mile. Guilbert is a highly accomplished artist. She makes all her effects in the simplest way and with perfect judgment. Like the ancient Greeks, not to mention the modern music-hall artists, she relies on the middle and low registers of her voice, they being the best suited for perfectly well-controlled declamation ; but her cantabile is charming, thanks to a fine ear and a delicate rhythmic faculty. Her command of every form of expression is very remarkable, her tones ranging from the purest and sweetest pathos to the cockniest Parisian cynicism. There is not a trace of the rowdy restlessness and forced go of the English music-hall singer about her ;....."

('Yvette Guilbert: Struggles and Victories', 1910)

Artist: Leonetto Cappiello (1875- 1942), 1899

Cogito, Ergo Sum: What About Helena Jans, René Descartes' Maid

A A. C. Grayling, ‘Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius ‘,2006:

“.....Descartes was without question a man of scientific bent. On Sunday 15 October 1634 he wrote in the flyleaf of a book that on that day he had conceived a child with the serving maid Helena Jans in the room he rented in the house of an Englishman called Thomas Sargent in Amsterdam's Westerkirkstraat. The confidence of this announcement—it proved true-—is striking. Baillet was in a dilemma, having thus to report his hero's commission of the sin of fornication with a maidservant, and not just that but the subsequent production of a bastard child; so he ascribed the aberration— as he thus implied it to be—to Descartes' scientific interest in anatomy.

In the register of baptisms in the Reformed Church at Deventer (no Catholic church being available), on 7 August 1635, the arrival was recorded of Francine, daughter to Helena Jans and "Rener Jochems" (Rener son of Jochems). There is no evidence, documentary or circumstantial, that Descartes married Helena Jans, but later enemies who were Catholics accused him of apostasy because he had married a Calvinist in a Protestant church, the claim doubtless being a fabrication from the fact that he had his child baptised in such a church.

And as it happens, Francine was not an illegitimate child despite the fact that Descartes did not marry her mother, for the law of the United Provinces stated that it was enough for children to be legitimate that their fathers acknowledged them....

..... Glimpses of Descartes as a family man are few but tantalising, and in respect of Helena Jans a little ambiguous. In a letter written in August 1637 he set out arrangements for Helena and Francine to join him in new lodgings. His hostess was, he wrote, perfectly happy to have the little girl (Descartes referred to her as "my niece") to come and live with him, "and that we would easily agree on the price because it was indifferent to her whether she had one child more or less to take care of" As Descartes' hostess was in need of a servant he also suggested that Helena hasten to leave her present employment "before St. Victor's Day," this being the traditional date for hiring and firing servants, and to come to work where he was lodging.

What this suggests is that Descartes and Helena did not live as a couple, although they liked to be together if they could, and that he was fond of his little daughter and wished to have her with him. If Helena worked as a maid in the house where Descartes and his "niece" lived, Helena could be near her daughter and she and Descartes could continue to engage, pace Clerselier's pieties, in anatomical experiments, without marrying or openly living in sin....”

 

“’Cogito, ergo sum’ is all very well for you, but what about me?”  

 
Artist: James Stevenson, The New Yorker, March 2017