Joan Didion

“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” (So true)

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” 

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”  

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” 

“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.” 

“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.” 

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notions of us… ” 

“I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.”

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Dylan & Pablo

“Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud.”

“I love you so much I’ll never be able to tell you; I’m frightened to tell you. I can always feel your heart. Dance tunes are always right: I love you body and soul: —and I suppose body means that I want to touch you and be in bed with you, and i suppose soul means that i can hear you and see you and love you in every single, single thing in the whole world asleep or awake” 

“We can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.”

“It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”  

~Dylan Thomas 

 

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Your Laughter

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

~Pablo Neruda

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Dear Jesus, Do Something

“Dear Jesus, do something.”

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”  

“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you–on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck–even then. And afterwards–perhaps most of all afterwards–I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B…without looking, or, without lifting the pencil…or in some other way…we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.”

“When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.”  

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life. ”

“Toska – noun /ˈtō-skə/ – Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”  

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him.”

~Vladimir Nabokov (My Personal God)

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Jeffrey Eugenides

“I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend.”

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.”

“She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.”

“It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.” 

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” 

“A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims–these are lucky eventualites but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name. We value love not because it’s stronger than death but because it’s weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn’t hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn’t write about it.”

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David Foster Wallace

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

“It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.” 

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love? “

“We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?” 

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” 

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”  

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.” 

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”

“Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”  

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

“The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes. But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think…The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali–it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.” 

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Smorgasbord: Ismat Chughtai, Come Here, Dead Ends

Last year I had decided to incorporate the works of eminent female authors of Indian origin into my reading list, the ones beside the predictable list of Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai that my generation identifies with. I started with the novels and memoirs of Kamala Das and Indira Goswami. I began 2013 with the short stories of Ismat Chughtai. They are unabashed, titillating, disturbing, provoking; they tell about the underbelly of conservative and orthodox households, about lost loves, about the lives of women from various nooks of the Indian society, and about the relationship dynamics in large households. In the anthology I had bought, there were stories about a dejected wife who embraces the devotion of the female servant whose rough hands massages her creamy white back and legs, and lets the servant do questionable things to her under the dark cover of a quilt every night; about a rogue Englishman, with  a glass eye, who stayed back even after India gained independence and tentatively tried to start a family with his Indian maid, under the mocking eyes of the very people he ruled; about an adolescent widow outcast from the household when the heir of the family impregnated her; about the lost years and love of two passionate individuals who never gathered the courage to confess their feelings; about the a pampered daughter-in-law plagued with the grief of serial miscarriages and the fear of her husband’s remarriage, witnessing the ease of birth of a child in a moving train; about how the craving for restless soul soured once it was possessed and tamed; about a tortured painter’s obsession with the thin line between pure innocence and veiled provocation of his subject. Ismat Chughtai is unconventional, hence unputdownable.

Love songs crowd the playlists on my phone and iPod. But the one I always return to sometime in the course of the day, is Kath Bloom’s ‘Come here‘. There is a scene in the movie ‘Before Sunrise’ when Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are in the listening booth of a music store, and this song starts, the words of which says what remains unsaid between them, and the subtle longing in their stares, and the wondering in their hearts, and the anticipation of what is to come. The palpable thrill of the unsaid. I’ll never tire of this beautiful song.

When you take the open road towards the unknown, with nothing but naked hope, you are wary of taking more than a few hesitant steps each day. When the sun shines on you and the fog around that obscure destination clears up a little, your gypsy feet tread with joy. But sometimes you wake up to an unfamiliar and hostile terrain surrounding you. Reason tells you to turn back before it’s too late, and you stand awkwardly, helplessly, not knowing what to do. The worst nightmare is to realize that you had been walking towards a dead end. You cry not for the lost time or the lost hope; but because walking back on your now weary feet would take so much longer. 

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