Sunday, August 26, 2007

Enough is enough is not enough

My dear procrastinating friend T,

You have brought numerous counts of shame and disrespect upon this beautiful blog by not blogging for as many days as you have thought fit. In spite of many a request from the so-called taskmaster mouthpiece of yours truly. May you find comfortable requests in diurnal work and other irksome obligations. May you be happy and prosperous. May your conscience be clear. Dio volontà.

I don't want y'all to go away thinking this is a post of infightin', for I believe in the true making of Tagore's perfect world - "Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls". So let us add some educated content to these embittered words.

Lately I have been reading a lot of books which on retrospect fall under the general realm of philosophy. Good philosophy. Milan Kundera, Herman Hesse, Mitch Album. Reminded of the profound animes like Ghost in the Shell and Arjuna.

So just to fill up some empty space, here goes some of the better quotes -

Each of us suffers (more or less) from the baseness of his too commonplace life and yearns to escape it and rise to a higher level.
All of us have known the illusion (more or less strong) that we are worthy of that higher level, that we are predestined and chosen for it.
- Milan Kundera, Unbearable lightness of being

For love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love.
If a woman tells you: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then you should be disappionted;
such love seems a rather self-interested business.
How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.
- Milan Kundera, Slowness

Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience *penetrate* you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you *fully*. That’s how you are able to leave it.
- Mitch Album, Tuesdays with Morrie

When someone is seeking...it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything...because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.
- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish. …Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

If our gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then it must be said that our love is scientific as well
- Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Innocence (Ghost in the Shell 2)


Most of my better friends have heard these quotes from me some time or the other. But that's fine. Hear it again. You never get enough.

The Enlightened One and the Punctual One,

H

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