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."

Sunday, August 10, 2025

H H Asquith, Edwin Montagu of India and Venetia Stanley ...Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions

David Hume: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions."

Robert Harris , author of 'Precipice' , 2024 to NYT Jan 2025:

"...H.H. Asquith, the prime minister, wrote 560 letters to Venetia, most of them in 1914 and 1915: She kept them all. I calculate she must have written him at least 300 in reply: He destroyed the lot. What a novelist can do and a historian can’t is invent. The moment I started to imagine what she might have written back to him, she started to come alive in my mind — clever, funny, unconventional...Her granddaughter let me see the letters she had written to other people. That helped to give me her voice. And from the letters he wrote to her, I could deduce the kinds of things she had said. I think she wrote quite passionately to him. It was a love affair completely unlike any other, between the leader of what was still, arguably, the most powerful country in the world, and a clever young woman less than half his age..."

Herbert Henry Asquith came to power as the Prime Minister of UK in May 1908. 


 Herbert Asquith (seated left) with Lord and Lady Allenby. 

Carrier-pigeon paranoia was part of the German spy scare that gripped Britain during the First World War

Edwin Montagu served under Asquith as Under-Secretary of State for India from 1910-1914. He was primarily responsible for the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms which led to the Government of India Act 1919, committing the British to the eventual evolution of India towards dominion status.

But interestingly when married Asquith, 60, his daughter and her close friend Venetia Stanley, 25 and Montagu, 33 were on a holiday in Italy in 1912, PM and his Under-Secretary of State for India fell in love with Venetia!

Robert Harris writes about the book "Letters to Venetia Stanley" By H.H. Asquith, edited by Michael and Eleanor Brock (1982) in WSJ December 14 2024:

"In August 1948, Judy Montagu, the daughter of a recently deceased English aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, was sorting through her mother’s effects when she came across more than 500 letters written by the then-prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, mostly in 1914-15. He was in his sixties; Stanley was in her twenties. The letters were not only startlingly passionate (“My darling… . Have I told you how much I love you? No? Just multiply the stars by the sands”). They were packed with secret information: intelligence estimates, statistics on armaments production, operational plans on the Western Front, detailed accounts of cabinet meetings. Interspersed among Asquith’s notes to Stanley were letters from Winston Churchill, Herbert Kitchener (the secretary of state for war), Queen Mary, John French (the commander of the British army in France), and decrypted ambassadorial telegrams, all of which Asquith had sent through the ordinary post. Often, he wrote to Stanley three times a day. It is the most startling political archive to come to light in the past 100 years. He was distraught when Stanley ended their affair in May 1915 (“This breaks my heart”). Less than a week later, Asquith dissolved his government—the last Liberal administration in British history."

Also see Simon Heffer's 'The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914'.


 Venetia Stanley, who married Montagu,  in 1914

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