The Desiderata of Happiness

Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its shams, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

: The Desiderata of Happiness by Max Ehrmann

Cats

I once had a cat, which

came home at eleven PM, one night and I

asked him, sweetheart, where you been? He did not

reply, and that was when I noticed he was wet-scraggly hair,

coat looking like a duster- I talked to him, he went out, to

sit in the balcony, lifting one eye to look

at me for a minute. He looked like tragedy.

Naturally, I followed him: Cat, where you been? It

hasn’t rained in three months, where you got

wet? And he raised an eye and looked at me

like I was an idiot and he was going to die.

That is ok, old friend, both of us

are too old, now- all lives lived, all

fires consumed. Soon we will die, and there will

be no one to mourn us, and the better. The cat raised

his head, gave me a stare, as if telling me to

stop being melodramatic. So I came back to

my room, thinking about

what was, is and will be- there was nothing to

do; I was too old, and a cat wet not in the rain did

have a right to curl up silently in a corner of

the balcony, and die.

Expression

I have been writing this for a long time, in

a handwriting not quite properly cursive, just in

the way I use to take notes in college, double spaced-

a sixty page notebook run through in three hours. There is

so much to say, and so few

words. Notice that last sentence? Notice how

the words are disconnected? A too clever

way of expression that falls flat. My writing is

like my conversations; pointless, and mostly

had in my head. I have been longing to

talk about loneliness, but now I can only obsess about

how beautiful my words are- they define my loneliness, do

they not? Do I see the sun refracted through the cloud

of dust, when I slap my pillow before going to sleep

at five on a Saturday? Does the yellow glint off the creek a few

miles away reflect my dreams? Are the noises, coming from the

road eight stories below, relevant to my silence?

There is a quiet theatricality to my silence, I

lay down hoping for eternity, or nothingness,

every night. Every morning, I wake up with the same half-life

I sold off, for my car. Every night, I long to walk.

Tomorrow is still a long way away.

Somethings About Books

1. The Best Book You Read Last Year- 2666 
2. A Book That You’ve Read More Than Three Times- Tons. Practically everything by Alistair Maclean and Frederick Forsyth
3. Your Favorite Series- The Philip Marlowe Novels/Chaos Walking Trilogy. Everyone knows everything about the Marlowe novels, so I will only talk about the Chaos Walking Trilogy. The hero of the novel is the last boy of a planet populated exclusively by males on a strange planet where everyone can hear everyone’s thoughts. What is there not to like.
4. Favorite Book of Your Favorite Series-  The Long Goodbye/The Knife of Never Letting Go (The first book of the Chaos Walking Trilogy. See above)
5. A Book That Makes You Happy- Yes Minister/The Harry Potter Books. Yes Minister is pretty much obvious. I have also spent many a happy afternoon at home with the Harry Potter books, it wasn’t until the sixth, I felt, that the series went to the dogs.
6. A Book That Makes You Sad- The Great Gatsby. I have read Gatsby only once, and it is a sad, sad book. But while, in isolation, I might have treated it as a kind of gentler, brighter version of Wuthering Heights, I have read a lot of Fitzgerald recently, and am halfway through Tender Is the Night, and occasionally read a few pages of Gatsby again.
7. Most Underrated Book- Tree of Smoke. I know Denis Johnson is a heavyweight, but somehow, no one I talk to seems to have read this great novel.
8. Most Overrated Book- The White Tiger
9. A Book You Thought You Wouldn’t Like But Ended Up Loving- A series, the Septimus Heap series. I read the books in a phase where I was very disappointed with the current fantasy fiction I was getting. With the simple language and engaging storytelling, I breezed through the first one in six hours odd and I do not think any of the books took more than a night to read. Fun filled, engaging novels.
10. Favorite Classic Book- Wuthering Heights. Enough said, really, no?
11. A Book You Hated- Almost everything by Arthur Hailey (also filed under books you liked when you read, but came later to regret). I ran through Arthur Hailey and Sidney Sheldon and Robert Ludlum like a thresher running through so much dry wheat when in high school. During grad school, chanced on a Hailey novel, tried to read it, and almost puked. Archer and Sheldon I can still read, though.
12. A Book You Used To Love But Don’t Anymore- The Godfather. Read it many times while still in school. Read it later, and it is not the same. While the story is still great, the prose is pedestrian, the sentences clunky, the characters seem artificial, and the book simply pales into insignificance after having seen the movie.
13. Your Favorite Writer- David Foster Wallace/Raymond Chandler. Or Ray Carver’s poems.  If I had to choose only three books I could spend my life with, I would pick one of each. If I had to pick only one, I would draw straws and lose either way.
14. Favorite Book Of Your Favorite Writer- All of Us, The Collected Poems of Raymond Carver.
15. Favorite Male Character-Philip Marlowe. What is not to love about a cynical, alcoholic gumshoe who is still not half as bent as the world around him?
16. Favorite Female Character- Lenore Beadsman. (Provisionally- cannot remember any other right now, except for the titular character in G B Shaw’s Candida)
17. A Book That Disappointed You- Ratner’s Star
18. Favorite Book Turned Into A Movie- LOTR.
19. Favorite Romance Book- Wonderboys, I guess, counts as a romance.
20. A Book You Wanted To Read For A Long Time But Still Haven’t- V, Strange Interlude, Poetry of Philip Larkin. At least I have read V halfway through.
21. A Book That You Wish More People Would’ve Read- Wizard of The Crow
22. A Character Who You Can Relate To The Most- Philip Pirrip
23. A Book That Changed Your Opinion about Something- A Fine Balance. Never had the idea of the horror which is also hidden in the history of this country stricken me as hard.
24. Favorite Title- Red Earth and Pouring Rain
25. A Book Everyone Hated But You Liked- The Percy Jackson books.
26. Most Eagerly Anticipated Books: Telegraph Avenue (Michael Chabon), and the sequels to Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey.

If you think this excercise was a narcisstic waste of time, send your brickbats to Anne.

P.S. Of course, everything on this list is dynamic. If you ask me to answer these 26 questions tomorrow, you might get different answers to many of the items.

All of My Days

All through this day, I have been wondering

about despair. Watching TV on the mute, and

thinking about the seventeen scars on my body, remembering

how each of them came to be- falls on cricket grounds, learning

to skate, that one time when

you threw a dish at me. It has been more than a

thousand days since…since…

Watching the TV on mute is a good thing, you

can ignore it, and can go on reading, or writing, or

thinking. You can stare into the whorls of dust

moved by the fan, and be catatonic.

Sometimes, I try to write this stuff down, tell you

what I feel, about you or for you or…sometimes,

I lay wake at night, trying to collect words into a beautiful

poem, which, I often hope, would rend your heart. But I fail, nothing

seems to be more anti-poetry, than efforts to write. All that I feel

grows inside me like a giant mushroom cloud, leaching on my insides,

your absence, the inability to write, and the anguish of

not being able to express any of it. And every such moment I realize, the

best of those poems of desperation-cannot be written. Poems

of despair are only to be felt.

Weathering

Three times today I picked up my phone, imagining

that it was ringing when, of course, it was

not. Twice I called back, to meet

wrong numbers. Checked my email

more than three hundred times in the last

one month. Every time, I know nothing

is going to change. I imagine you

calling, and remonstrating- but

it never seems to happen. You know, times are pretty difficult

when your loves live inside your head. I wait for you,

at the end of a very long, white painted corridor, with

thirteen doors between you and me- too many

exit options, I believe, and I would

walk towards you, if not

forbidden- just to improve my odds. But then,

there are these walls, and you, and…

I would not walk across a passageway, you

would not walk beyond a tree. This rain in which I stand

is this real or imaginary? Does this wet you too? Do

you also stand in the balcony with open arms, when

thunderclaps shake this world?

In Defense of Blogging

(Or Tweeting or Instagramming or Facebook Statuses)

Of late, I have been hearing rather a lot about people blogging and tweeting and facebooking and instagramming- and much has been made of the quality of the posts on offer, and why we are doing what we are doing and should we be doing something different, like may be writing a book, which, ostensibly would be a better utilization of our time. One frequent explanation proffered for this deluge of status updates (whether in a few words on FB/Twitter, on via pics on instagram or via eloquent posts or incoherent rants on blogs and other such fora) is that we all seek to massage our egos- the breakdown of this argument being that such posts/updates are essentially a reminder to the world of the arrival of the person posting it- ‘Hey, I am here! Are you?’ While I do not completely rule that sentiment out, I am not in full agreement with it, either. I believe that this is a more primal need- a need to communicate with like minded people, a yearning for dialogue and approval from what one perceives as one’s peer group- in an ironic twist, the more our lives are becoming compartmentalized and insular, the greater our need to communicate seems to be.

The other day I was reading an essay by Salman Rushdie dealing with the themes of emigrant literature, history and the role of literature in society. These are big themes, and not relevant to the topic I am trying to briefly tackle here, but his explanation of ‘who’ do we write for seems to me to be pertinent to the current discussion:

“This raises immediately the question of whom one is writing ‘for’. My own, short answer is that I have never had a reader in mind. I have ideas, people, events, shapes, and I write ‘for’ those things, and hope that the completed work will be of interest to others. But which others? In the case of Midnight’s Children I certainly felt that if its subcontinental readers had rejected the work, I should have thought it a failure, no matter what the reaction in the West. So I would say that I write ‘for’ people who feel part of the things I write ‘about’: but also for everyone else whom I can reach.” (emphasis mine)

The context is different, but the parts I have put in bold above seem, to me, to apply to every scrap of writing or tweeting or status updating that is done for public consumption. And the need for finding that empathy is also a large part (apart from the egotism) of why we write*.

As an aside, a lot of people complain about information overload and signal-noise ratios in the age of the web. I disagree; I have long believed that more than an information problem, what we have on our hands is a problem of effective filtering. 

Your thoughts are welcome.

*This, here, is about personal (i.e. unaffiliated/individual, for want of a better word) writing for public consumption, and I do not presume to include the writing of literature or journalism in the ambit of these narrow, individualistic causes/motives of writing.

P.S. The Rushdie quote is from a 1982 essay called Imaginary Homelands, which can be found on the London Review of Books. There might be a free subscription requirement.