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

Friday, July 21, 2023

Oppenheimer's Hamlet, Waste Land and Gita...श्रद्धेचा घडिला जीव जशी श्रद्धा तसा चि तो...

#Oppenheimer

 JAMES A. HIJIYA, "The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer", June 2000:

"...Oppenheimer acquired a deeper knowledge of the Bhagavad-Gita in 1933 when, as a young professor of physics with interests ranging far beyond his academic specialty, he studied Sanskrit with Professor Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. The Gita, Oppenheimer excitedly wrote to his brother, was “very easy and quite marvelous.” This is the earliest direct evidence of the impression the book made on Oppenheimer, and a lasting impression it was. Later he called the Gita “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” He kept a well-worn copy of it conveniently on hand on the bookshelf closest to his desk and often gave the book (in translation) to friends as a present. He continued to browse in it while directing the bomb laboratory. After President Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Oppenheimer spoke at a memorial service at Los Alamos and quoted a passage from the Gita. Clearly this ancient book was on his mind as the atomic bomb neared completion, even before he saw the dazzling fireball from the Trinity test. In later years, too, he would look back on the Gita as one of the most important influences in his life. In 1963, Christian Century magazine asked him to list the ten books that “did most to shape your vocational attitude and your philosophy of life.” Along with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Eliot’s Waste Land, Oppenheimer listed the Gita...."

What did he quote at FDR's funeral service on  April 15, 1945:

सत्त्वानुरूपा सर्वस्य श्रद्धा भवति भारत |
श्रद्धामयोऽयं पुरुषो यो यच्छ्रद्ध: स एव स: ||  (अध्याय १७, श्लोक ३)

विनोबा भावे त्याचे रूपांतर गीताई मध्ये असे करतात:

"जसा स्वभाव तो ज्याचा श्रद्धा त्याची तशी असे 

श्रद्धेचा घडिला जीव जशी श्रद्धा तसा चि तो "

"The faith of all humans conforms to the nature of their mind. All people possess faith, and whatever the nature of their faith, that is verily what they are."


Memorial service speech for President Roosevelt by J. R. Oppenheimer (courtesy: Berkeley Library Digital Collections, University of California)

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