125th post

from one moment to the next
i am not the same
and yet i retain enough of me
to recognize myself
and like me too

"'What are you talking about? Of course he was in love with me. D'you think a girl doesn't know when a man's in love with her?'
'Oh I dare say he was in love with you after a fashion. He didn't know any girl so intimately as he knew you. You'd played around together since you were children. He expected himself to be in love with you. He had the normal sexual instinct. It seemed such a natural thing that you should marry. There woudn't have been any practical difference in your relations except that you lived under the same roof and went to bed together.'
Isabel, to some extent mollified, waited for me to go on and, knowing that women are always glad to listen when you discourse upon love, I went on.
'Moralists try to persuade us that the sexual instinct hasn't got so very much to do with love. They're apt to speak of it as if it were an epiphenomenon.'
'What in God's name is that?'
'Well there are psychologists who think that consciousness accompanies brain processes and is determined by them, but doesn't itself exert any influence on them. Something like the reflection of a tree in water; it couldn't exist without the tree, but it doesn't in any way affect the tree. I think it's all stuff and nonsense to say that there can be love without passion; when people say love can endure after passion is dead they're talking of something else, affection, kindliness, community of taste and interest, and habit. Especially habit. Two people can go on having sexual intercourse from habit in just the same way as they grow hungry at the hour they're accustomed to have their meals. Of course there can be desire without love. Desire isn't passion. Desire is the natural consequence of the sexual instinct and it isn't of any more importance than any other function of the human animal. That's why women are foolish to make a song and dance if their husbands have an occasional flutter when the time and the place are propitious.'
'Does that apply only to men?'
I smiled.
'If you insist I'll admit that what is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. The only thing to be said against it is that with a man a passing connexion of that sort has no emotional significance, while with a woman it has.'
'It depends on the woman.'
I wasn't going to let myself be interrupted.
'Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment. What d'you suppose Keats meant when he told the lover on his Grecian urn not to grieve? "Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!" Why? Because she was unattainable, and however madly the lover pursued she still eluded him. For they were both imprisoned in the marble of what I suspect was a n indifferent work of art. Your love for Larry and his for you were as simple and natural as the love of Paolo and Francesca or Romeo and Juliet. Fortunately for you it didn't come to a bad end. You made a rich marriage and Larry roamed the world to find out what song the Sirens sang. Passion didn't enter into it.'
'How d'you know?'
'Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion siezes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum.'
Before I finished this harangue i knew very well that Isabel wasn't paying any attention to me, but was occupied with her own reflections. But her next remark surprised me.
'Do you think Larry is a virgin?'
'My dear, he's thirty-two.'
'I'm certain he is.'
'How can you be?'
'That's the kind of thing a woman knows instinctively.'
'I knew a young man who had a very prosperous career for some years by convincing one beautiful creature after another that he's never had a woman. He said it worked like a charm.'
'I don't care what you say. I believe in my intuition.'
It was growing late, Gray and Isabel were dining with friends, and she had to dress. I had nothing to do, so I walked in the pleasant spring evening up the Boulevard Raspail. I have never believed very much in women's intuition; it fits in too neatly with what they want to believe to persuade me that it is trustworthy; and as I thought of the end of my long talk with Isabel I couldn't help but laugh.
...'"


- Somerset Maugham in The Razor's Edge



i remember quoting the following to someone in a similar context about what I could never settle for even if it was the most natural thing then:

"love is a pretty poor forecaster
passion leads to disaster
it's something else that makes me sure
our bond will last five decades more"

that was Vikram Seth and it had always stuck in my mind as being very sad. like giving up on all your dreams in a way. simply resigning. a huge compromise.
i wanted passion to sweep me away mercilessly...

am i vain or is it self appeasing. it begins with a realisation that i have very few guy friends. in every place that i'v made my home or basically wherever i have stopped in this continuously relocating life of mine, i feel that more than one guy starts falling for me. and it is difficult because these guys who i feel going soft on me, are the ones i would actually have liked to know better and get friendly with. and then soon as i like someone enough to want to be friends with, i get these strangest side glances and unasked for attention and discomfort from them.

i think its actually deeper rooted than that. theres somthing formidable in this small frame of mine that normally has ppl, esp those of the opposite sex maintain a respectful distance with me. don't ask me why. actually i think its these huge scary eyes of mine. i'm serious. they scare me in the mirror sometimes. anyway, wherever the horror appeal; the fear is real. so basically these scared guys treat me like an ice maiden. and then suddenly if i start being nice to someone, or i get revealed to someone as not actually being the snob and tyrant that i resembled; they flip once twice and (pass this off as my imagination or plain exaggeration) they are bowled over. he he he. actually its not so funny. i lose prospective friends. and as there are very few lucky people who get such prospects, eventually i have concluded with a strong belief that i will not make any more new friends in my life. girls? uff. somehow with women i am actually saturated. they just try my patience now. i mean the new ones in my life (and some of the old). thankfully there are some engaged guys i like and can afford to be nice to. and all this actually amounts to my having very few friends in fact. but thats ok i guess. because many old deleted ones i trashed myself and then emptied the recycle bin.

i have been wanting to write something more professional for quite some time. by professional i do not mean in the artistic sense but in the politico-economic sense. because that is what i am working on and have been reading and tracking even beyond work. and yet nothing gets written by me in time. i mean, when i can confidently write about something, usually by then the topic has died a natural death in everybody's minds. or if not that then there are already so many write ups available in the media that mine would look like a cut-copy-paste even if my fingers typed unknowingly. so there. an economist my age. who can't predict too many things. well actually nothing with certainty. has to wait for the journalists for what actually happened. and then i can only comment on a topic after its demise (even that i don't actually do). sometimes then i am jubilant and wistful. theres a sense of "i knew it would turn out like that. only if i had put something down in words."

how do the people who rise begin their flight. i mean how are they confident in their first few stumbling steps. how does a fresh graduate student monitor and handle people working under him/her. i could spend a lifetime without achieving anything great and i can almost prophesy that. without a forecast and without any data. how does a young economist walk through life to finally become a national security advisor? or manmohan singh for that matter. i would have liked to know the PM as a young scholar. where do these people get their conviction from. and what do the people who are not Nashes do? basically what do the 'not-geniuses' do on earth.

"Look, we don't love like flowers
with only one season behind us; when we love,
a sap older than memory rises in our arms. O girl,
it's like this: inside us we haven't loved just some one
in the future, but a fermenting tribe; not just one
child, but fathers, cradled inside us like ruins
of mountains, the dry riverbed
of former mothers, yes, and all that
soundless landscape under its clouded
or clear destiny - girl, all this came before you."




- quoted by ghosh in the hungry tide from Rilke

we have reached such a state of numbness that bomb blasts have become a joke for most of us. the day after is spent amusingly relating tales of whereabouts and how narrowly the bombs missed one. there is a sense of triumph in people who think they could have been but were not killed. there are laughs about who could have planted a bomb in a dustbin and who has an alibi.

till you are one of those still in a hospital either looking at yourself or someone you know.

his nose travels all the way up