Adventure

         It’s terrible to be far away from one
	another. Really, it’s difficult to keep an
	affair going when one is here and the other is
	somewhere else. But, at the same time…it’s
	comforting.  Because it gives you a chance to
	consider what you want and how you want it…
	but when he’s right there before you all the
	time… well, he’s right there…

~ Anna, L’Avventura

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural.

I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands -

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

~Louis Macniece

On Moral Relativism

When Darius was king of Persian he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his county and asked them would they take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do, Not for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greek and through the interpreters so that they could understand what was said. he asked some Indians of the tribe called Callaltiae. who do eat their parents’ dead bodies’ whether they would burn them [as was the Greek custom]. They uttered a cry of orror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing.

~ Moral Relativism

Balzac on Labour

Constant labour is the law of art as well as the law of life, for art is the creative activity of the mind: And so great artists, true poets, do not wait for either commissions or clients ; They create today, tomorrow, ceaselessly. And there results a habit of toil, a perpetual consciousness of the difficulties, that keeps them in state of marriage with the Muse, and her creative forces.

~Balzac

Naipaul and the Sikh

I made the rickshawman turn and take me back to the restaurant. There was no sign of the Sikh. But the Punjabi, his eyes wild with humiliation and anger, was at the cash-desk with a group who appeared to know him.

‘I am going to kill your friend,’ he shouted at me.

‘I am going to kill that Sikh tomorrow.’

‘You are not going to kill anybody.’

‘I am going to kill him. I am going to kill you too.’

I went back to the hotel. The telephone rang.

‘Hallo, punk.’ ‘Hello.’ (So you ran out on me when I was in a little trouble. And you call yourself a friend. You know what I think of you? You are a dirty South Indian swine. Don’t go to sleep. I am coming over to beat you up.’

~ An Area of Darkness

Young Naipaul On Brits , post war-1951

The English are a queer people. Take it from me. The longer live in England, the more queer they appear. There is something so orderly, and yet so adventurous about them, so ruttish, so courageous. Take the chaps in the college. The world is crashing about their heads, about all our heads. Is their reaction as emotional as mine? Not a bit. They ignore it for the most part, drink, smoke, and imbibe shocking quantities of tea and coffee, read the newspapers and seem to forget what they have read.

~VS Naipaul to sister  Kamla, January 1951

L’après-midi d’un faune

These nymphs that I would perpetuate:

so clear

And light, their carnation, that it floats in the air

Heavy with leafy slumbers.

Did I love a dream?

My doubt, night’s ancient hoard, pursues its theme

In branching labyrinths, which being still

The veritable woods themselves, alas, reveal

My triumph as the ideal fault of roses.

Consider…

if the women of your glosses

Are phantoms of your fabulous desires!

Faun, the illusion flees from the cold, blue eyes

Of the chaster nymph like a fountain gushing tears:

But the other, all in sighs, you say, compares

To a hot wind through the fleece that blows at noon?

No! through the motionless and weary swoon

Of stifling heat that suffocates the morning,

Save from my flute, no waters murmuring

In harmony flow out into the groves;

And the only wind on the horizon no ripple moves,

Exhaled from my twin pipes and swift to drain

The melody in arid drifts of rain,

Is the visible, serene and fictive air

Of inspiration rising as if in prayer.

Relate, Sicilian shores, whose tranquil fens

My vanity disturbs as do the suns,

Silent beneath the brilliant flowers of flame:

"That cutting hollow reeds my art would tame,

I saw far off, against the glaucous gold

Of foliage twined to where the springs run cold,

An animal whiteness languorously swaying;

To the slow prelude that the pipes were playing,

This flight of swans — no! naiads — rose in a shower

Of spray…"

Day burns inert in the tawny hour

And excess of hymen is escaped away —

Without a sign, from one who pined for the primal A:

And so, beneath a flood of antique light,

As innocent as are the lilies white,

To my first ardours I wake alone.

Besides sweet nothings by their lips made known,

Kisses that only mark their perfidy,

My chest reveals an unsolved mystery…

The toothmarks of some strange, majestic creature:

Enough! Arcana such as these disclose their nature

Only through vast twin reeds played to the skies,

That, turning to music all that clouds the eyes,

Dream, in a long solo, that we amused

The beauty all around us by confused

Equations with our credulous melody;

And dream that the song can make love soar so high

That, purged of all ordinary fantasies

Of back or breast — incessant shapes that rise

In blindness — it distills sonorities

From every empty and monotonous line.

Then, instrument of flights, Syrinx malign,

At lakes where you attend me, bloom once more!

Long shall my discourse from the echoing shore

Depict those goddesses: by masquerades,

I’ll strip the veils that sanctify their shades;

And when I’ve sucked the brightness out of grapes,

To quell the flood of sorrow that escapes,

I’ll lift the empty cluster to the sky,

Avidly drunk till evening has drawn nigh,

And blow in laughter through the luminous skins.

Let us inflate our MEMORIES, O nymphs.

"Piercing the reeds, my darting eyes transfix,

Plunged in the cooling waves, immortal necks,

And cries of fury echo through the air;

Splendid cascades of tresses disappear

In shimmering jewels. Pursuing them, I find

There, at my feet, two sleepers intertwined,

Bruised in the languor of duality,

Their arms about each other heedlessly.

I bear them, still entangled, to a height

Where frivolous shadow never mocks the light

And dying roses yield the sun their scent,

That with the day our passions might be spent."

I adore you, wrath of virgins–fierce delight

Of the sacred burden’s writhing naked flight

From the fiery lightning of my lips that flash

With the secret terror of the thirsting flesh:

From the cruel one’s feet to the heart of the shy,

Whom innocence abandons suddenly,

Watered in frenzied or less woeful tears.

"Gay with the conquest of those traitorous fears,

I sinned when I divided the dishevelled

Tuft of kisses that the gods had ravelled.

For hardly had I hidden an ardent moan

Deep in the joyous recesses of one

(Holding by a finger, that her swanlike pallor

From her sister’s passion might be tinged with colour,

The little one, unblushingly demure),

When from my arms, loosened by death obscure,

This prey, ungrateful to the end, breaks free,

Spurning the sobs that still transported me."

Others will lead me on to happiness,

Their tresses knotted round my horns, I guess.

You know, my passion, that crimson with ripe seeds,

Pomegranates burst in a murmur of bees,

And that our blood, seized by each passing form,

Flows toward desire’s everlasting swarm.

In the time when the forest turns ashen and gold

And the summer’s demise in the leaves is extolled,

Etna! when Venus visits her retreat,

Treading your lava with innocent feet,

Though a sad sleep thunders and the flame burns cold.

I hold the queen!

Sure punishment…

No, but the soul,

Weighed down by the body, wordless, struck dumb,

To noon’s proud silence must at last succumb:

And so, let me sleep, oblivious of sin,

Stretched out on the thirsty sand, drinking in

The bountiful rays of the wine-growing star!

Couple, farewell; I’ll see the shade that now you are.

        ~ Stéphane Mallarmé

The Book of Disquiet

I am suffering from a headache and the universe.

~Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

On Indian Writing:

I don’t think R K Narayan exalted his material or that Mulk Raj Anand, writing in the Thirties and later, did. I think it’s occurred with the latest crop of writers, who have been encouraged by all kinds of foolish people to do these family sagas, and it’s so bad for India, the encouragement of this rubbish. Because writing isn’t that. It shouldn’t be about cracking yourself up so that people on the outside say, ‘We knew Indians were grand people after all. Kipling didn’t say so, and others didn’t say so, but here we have the evidence.’
You know and I know there’s no such thing as Indian grandeur. Here these boys are doing it, all in a great rush since the Nineties, and it’s as bogus as hell. It really implies that they have never looked outside their little tawdry family circle.o Fa

~VS Naipaul talking to Farrukh Dondi

On Universities:

I think these universities have passed their peak. The very idea of the university may be finished. In Oxford, for a long time, they were producing divines. Then it took a turn and the University began to produce smart people. The idea of learning came quite late, in the early nineteenth century perhaps, and it went on some way into the twentieth. Now, apart from sciences, there seems to be no purpose to a university education. The Socialists want to send everybody to these places. I feel that these places ought to be wrapped up and people should buy their qualifications at the Post Office.

VS Naipaul speaking to Farrukh Dondi.

Loneliness

Being apart and lonely is like rain.
It climbs toward evening from the ocean plains;
from flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs
to heaven, which is its old abode.
And only leaving when heaven drops upon the city.

It rains down on us in those twittering hours
when the streets turn their faces to the dawn,
and when two bodies who have found nothing,
disappointed and depressed, roll over;
and when two people who despise each other
have to sleep together in one bed -

that is when loneliness receives the rivers.

~RM Rilke

Bloody Men

Bloody men are like bloody buses -
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,
Offering you a ride.
You’re trying to read the destinations,
You haven’t much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off , and you’ll stand there and gaze
While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days.

~Wendy Cope

PS-  A poem for Wendy Cope:

Hey Wendy, I know I know
you are not all very approving about
posting your poems online. But look,
I’ve said its yours. Haven’t I?

You know, I could have said
it was written by Wendy Chinaski or
Marvin the metal detector? It’s not like they
would be offended; those
bloody buses.

What more? I found it online.
You know, anyone could have.