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."

Saturday, August 03, 2024

100 Years of Joseph Conrad's Absence...नव्या नगाऱ्याच्या आवाजात फार दुर्लक्षित झाले आहेत

 जी ए कुलकर्णी, मे १७ १९८०:

"...Conrad किंवा Hardy सारखे लेखक नव्या नगाऱ्याच्या आवाजात फार दुर्लक्षित झाले आहेत. विशेषतः Conrad मला फार श्रेष्ठ लेखक वाटतो. कारण त्याचे कथानक एक metaphor असतो, तर विषय जीवनातील साक्षात्कार किंवा भ्रमनिरास किंवा anguish चे असतात..."
 
(पृष्ठ: १९४, 'जी.एं.ची निवडक पत्रे: खंड १', १९९५)
 
Jacob Epstein, "Let There Be Sculpture", 1940:
 
"...A sculptor had previously made a bust of him which represented him as an open-necked, romantic, out-of-door type of person. In appearance he was the very opposite. His clothes were immaculately conventional, and his collar enclosed his neck like an Iron Maiden’s vice or a garroter’s grip. He was worried if his hair and beard were not trim and neat as became a sea captain. There was nothing shaggy or Bohemian about him. His glance was keen despite the drooping of one eyelid. He was the sea captain, the officer, and in our talks he emphasized the word “responsibility.” Responsibility weighed on him, weighed him down. He used the word again and again, and one immediately thought of Lord Jim—the conscience suffering at the evasion of duty. It may have been because I met him late in life that Conrad gave me a feeling of defeat; but defeat met with courage...
 
....He was a good sitter, always strictly punctual, and he stuck to the stand, giving me plenty of opportunity for work and study. I was with him for twenty-one days. Once, while posing, he had a heart attack, and he felt faint. His manservant brought him a stiff whisky, and he insisted on renewing the sitting. I had no hesitations while at work, owing to his very sympathetic attitude. A doubtful or critical attitude of the sitter will sometimes hang like a dark cloud over the work and retard it. Conrad’s sympathy and good will were manifest. He would beam at me with a pleased expression and forget his rheumatism and the tree outside the window at which he railed. The tree was large and beautiful, but to Conrad it was a source of misery.
 

  Bust of Joseph Conrad, by Jacob Epstein, 1924 at National Portrait Gallery, London