Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The intimate tango of sadness and radiance is ultimately what gives his music its timeless edge in penetrating the soul.

Listen to Tchaikovsky after reading this and absorb the depth and beauty of his music...let it go deep into your soul.

Go Set A Watchman

Historical events lose their edges, and even their shapes, as they get recalled, pulled out of the depths of time.

Our emotions over events past get colored - they become brighter or darker, shaded or clear.

Our memories play hide-and-seek, remember some things, forget others...some memories seem very different maybe even alien.

The way we view people and events from past stages in life is naturally totally different from how we view them in the present.

.....simply because we have changed over the years.


Read Harper Lee's 'Go Set A Watchman' keeping these in mind. And along the way re-read and revise the recorded History of the times.

It's a fantastic book...

From 'An Unnecessary Woman' by Rabih Alameddine

Words, phrases and sentences to think about:


1. Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. ....he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character's actions. Novels tend to lose their flavor because we are 'always supposed to infer causality.'

2. 'None of us knows how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.'

3. 'If you think Madame Bovary commits adultery because she's trying to escape the banality of Pleistocene morals, then her betrayals are not yours.'

4. '...I do what makes me happy sometimes. I don't suffer from anhedonia after all.'

5. 'When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.'

wish you well

by David Baldacci

I'm reading this book a second time. There is something haunting about it.

Today, I came across these fantastic words:

1. ........the distinct beauty of the language never overshadowed the blunt force of the story.

and

2. Excitement, nervousness, panic and hope competed for space on the small landscape of their faces.

Josef Pieper

....we have commodified our aliveness so much as to mistake making a living for having a life.


.....the strange tapestry of tenderness and wilderness of which the human soul is woven.

Charles Bukowski

on writing...

I didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to grammar, and when I write it is for the love of the word, the color, like tossing paint on a canvas, and using a lot of ear and having read a bit here and there, I generally come out ok, but technically I don’t know what’s happening, nor do I care.

Go, set a watchman

Isaiah 21:6 reads:

“For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”

In the wake of the release of Harper Lee's book, the papers have been flooded with impressions, analyses and reviews on the book. Questions are being raised on its ethical value.... Trying to figure out what the title meant and why Lee had chosen it, this is the best explanation I came across:

"Nelle (Harper Lee) probably likened Monroeville to Babylon. The Babylon of immoral voices, the hypocrisy,” said Flynt, who is also a longtime friend to Lee. "Somebody needs to be set as the watchman to identify what we need to do to get out of the mess."

A nice turn of phrase

Wear your knowledge lightly

Why I enjoy David Baldacci

is not only because of the fantastic momentum he creates right from the first word, but also because he packs in a lot of information on a variety of things.

Here's one:

'"King Fu," literally translated, meant a skilful ability attained through hard work. Thus, someone could be a baseball player and be deemed to have good "kung fu."'

Language of the apes

Apes actually talk to each other.  "The sounds uttered by these apes have all the characteristics of true speech," wrote Garner. "The speaker is conscious of the meaning of the sound used, and uses it with the definite purpose of conveying an idea to the one addressed."

 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32966907

The monks of Guinsa, South Korea

They don’t mind if you’re rich or poor, Buddhist or Christian, Korean or British; as an expression of gratitude, you are cordially invited to lunch.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20150429-a-free-meal-with-south-koreas-monk

Through our differences, we are all the same

In a huge leap for transgender people in India, Manobi Bandopadhyay became the first person from the community to head an educational institution. Professor Bandopadhyay took over as Principal of Krishnanagar Women’s College in Nadia district of West Bengal on June 9.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/kolkata/bengal-to-have-indias-first-transgender-principal/article7252192.ece

The Kabuliwalas of Calcutta

These people from distant Afghanistan, who have settled down in Calcutta, carry their distinct identity even as they  meld with and become part of Bengali culture. Some have been living here for many, many decades. What holds them together are their customs and traditions.

Today, there are only 5,000 Kabuliwala families in Calcutta, a city of 16 million people. Though officially stateless, the city offers them the dignity of a final resting place.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32377276

On beauty

Read this in my wanderings through books. Liked the use of words...

The Western conception of beauty – a stylized fantasy constructed by airbrushing reality into a narrow and illusory ideal of perfection.

Whereas,

The zenith of Japanese aesthetics is deeply rooted in the glorious imperfection of the present moment and its relationship to the realities of the past.

Susan Sontag again

Her take on Literature and Television:

Literature tells stories. Television gives information.

Literature involves. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances – immures us in our own indifference.

In Literature - stories.....there is always an ethical component. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution. Television offers obtuseness, non-understanding, passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling through its glut of unending stories.

Who else but Susan Sontag could have written this

'Literature's essential allure – the comfort of appeasing our anxiety about life's infinite possibility, about all the roads not taken and all the immensities not imagined that could have led to a better destination than our present one.

A story, instead, offers the comforting finitude of both time and possibility.'

I loved this one -

'Endings in a novel confer a kind of liberty that life stubbornly denies us: to come to a full stop that is not death and discover exactly where we are in relation to the events leading to a conclusion.'

Loved this word

describing modern devices...iDistraction

An utterly delicious thought

We are cultural stardust.

Loved these two statements

1, We take our personal histories with us when we travel.

Got this from: Cruising the Past, from Baltimore to Charleston
By Susan Stewart


And another one I came across was this one:


2. On our journeys....

The weight of your emotional baggage may vary.

A strange usage

I was talking to a professional Kathak dancer yesterday, who also teaches dance. She was bemoaning the fact that her students just don't put in enough time for practice, and worse, really don't want to learn about the Kathak dance form. She said:

Nowadays the children only want maggi dance.

What she meant was that children want something instant - something they can learn just for that one show...

On silence

That most precious of qualities to cultivate and possess.

Silence is itself the stuff of substance; the moments it fills are not the inbetweenery of life but life itself – rich and nuanced and irrepressibly, if quietly, alive.

~ Deborah Underwood

Reminds me of what I read about the rests in music. Rests are not the inbetweenery of the notes of the piece - it creates the melody - it makes the makes the music come alive.

Don Rath Jr. says: Rests allow us the ability to add depth and additional emotions to music through the use of silence.

About horses

There is something very special about horses. I love the way Sharon Ralls Lemon puts it:

The essential joy of being with horses is that it brings us in contact with the rare elements of grace, beauty, spirit, and fire.

Hygge

Hygge, pronounced 'hooga, actually comes from a Norwegian word meaning "well-being." It first appeared in Danish writing in the 18th Century and has been embraced by the Danes ever since!

Hygge means creating a warm atmosphere and enjoying the good things in life with good people. The warm glow of candlelight is hygge. Friends and family is hygge too. There's nothing more hygge than sitting round a table, discussing the big and small things in life.

Susegad

Susegad is a concept which is associated with Goa. It is derived from the Portuguese word sossegado which means quiet. Sadly, the word has acquired negative connotations and is taken to mean a relaxed attitude and enjoyment of life.

However, this is not what susegad meant. It means contentment, and being at peace with yourself.

Got an apt word

word-nerd

Came across this in a sentence which tells of an argument with a person who has a fantastic vocabulary. Such people can use words to turn and twist any argument in their favor, and you are left wondering where the argument started and where it went and indeed, where it ended!

Check this out

Fiction makes the world real.

And another one:

Reality is in the eye of the beholder.



A suggested read - Revenge Wears Prada - for those of us who loved The Devil Wears Prada, if just for the last sentence in this review:

I’d rather work for Miranda Priestly any day.