his friend is quite outgoing and extrovertish, but my cousin is not. I was trying to understand, gently pointing out that crowds and socializing can be tiring such that the pandemic can offer a valid excuse and thus some relief (?).
I later thought about it a lot. work and family and home. what else is there really? yes, once in a while exploring untrodden paths and swimming in unknown tides. and staring at trees, the horizon, mountains and lichens, into the distance and the sun, dreaming out onto old town roofs, talking to strangers yes and exchanging stories and smiles and foods and wines, and sweating happily in all that exploration in many different ways. but only temporarily. till one feels drawn back by the need to work or that to get home. to a one person family or more, or even to an alone home so one can work.
is work what is exchanged for a means to a living? or is it one's effort to contribute in some way what only one can. I feel like that's where the answer lies. between work and home and family being enough or not. similarly, whether home and family are truly an extension of one's self or are intrusions, uninvited and inescapable.
I've been reading a lot of book samples these days, not knowing what I want and choosing more carefully, spending a lil more wisely. there are good samples that I will still not ending up buying, where the 50-odd pages are somewhat enough even if they soothed me, informed me, helped me calm down before dozing off. but then there are samples where I so badly want to highlight words, phrases, sentences, thoughts. even if I know I'll rarely come back to read them. these books I must buy. last night the sample mostly consisted of an introduction, something of a literary review of the book by another author/critic. samples don't allow highlighting; so I had to buy the book. and now I'll have to look for this second author, this critic, and his books too. if his intro to another's text was so highlightable I hope his writing is too. btw below, a few highlighted bits from Philipp Meyer's introduction to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
"When you are judging a literary masterpiece, you are judging first the substance and ideas behind the work. Are they true, are they worth saying, does the book articulate them organically (without talking over the characters) and in a way no one has done before? You are judging the artist's ability to capture a world and the people in it and the ability to work in a mode so distinct it can only be hers or his. You would not confuse a Van Gogh with a Rembrandt - in fact you would be able to identify both at a glance. At the highest level, prose should be no different."
"the Judge is constantly recording things in his notebooks, sketches and observations, in attempt to replace or supplant the real item (which he physically destroys when possible). This is not so different from what the artist hopes to do. Few of us know anything about fifteenth-century Danish kings, but most of us know the story of Hamlet. Such as it is with Chamberlain and Cormac McCarthy. Art has eclipsed the Real."
"a man moves about the barren plain "striking fire that God has placed" in the earth. He is digging holes for fenceposts, creating the demarcation between civilization and the wild; or, depending on your point of view, between a new civilization and an old one. Other men follow him blindly. They see only the holes he has dug. They don't see the man. They don't see his fire."
in other stories, watching Mira Nair's A Suitable Boy is bringing back not just the book and it's visual scenes and heartfelt characters, but is also bringing back the time and that past me when I was reading that book about 10 years ago. I read it partly in India and partly in my first home alone (technically with a flatmate but not really a companion) in Texas. I remember being immersed in it, moved by it, remember even that I read the stampede scene a lil after a similar one had occured in India in reality. And now it's all coming back, not just the emotions that the story and the characters whip within my soul, but my frame of mind then when I read it, my innocence and my optimism, my lack of disenchantment and disillusionment. one thing that strikes me now (and it did not then) is how there's a common theme in the stories of many characters in the book: that of Faiz's "humse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang ...". another is how the horror of partition that till now always felt so in the past now feels so much more like an ever present threat.
anyway, from India to Texas and back, between books and stories, I'll be smiling some more nights in my bed as I highlight words that resonate deep within somewhere. the act of highlighting though has changed, I don't need a pencil or a fluorescent one, now my finger suffices.
