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Reading this amazing novel ( Death at Intervals ) by Saramago. Oh,, what can I say about it... The more you read Saramago, the more enchanted you feel. Food for thought! Yes, feels as if this guy is inexhaustible. In this book, he plays with the idea of Death. I am at the place where it is best to be in a good book: right in the middle of it. Woof, what unbelievable pages I am reading; these are some thoughts that Saramago, taking you by the arm, show once; then twice. At this stage of the book, I’d share a thought that he’s held in his arms for us to hold and think about: "By the way, we feel we must mention that death, by herself and alone, with no external help, has always killed far less than mankind has."  p. 98 In the context of the narrative, these words appear at a point, where you are taken aback, with eyes opening to the extent of your mind noticing it. The pages that follow, have opened up the argument in the most subtle of wa

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Hello everyone... Its been a few days since I posted my last. What has made do it today is my coming across certain words... It is my first meeting with the (words of) Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, and I will soon learn the correct pronunciation of the name :)  Well, I read a few poems by him today... and boy oh boy... words can move the heaviest stone, I say. There is something which stirs inside you, reading a word followed by another and then another... till the immovable stone has already moved under its own weight; with the movement, you catch the beat of your heart... Would like to share with you, one poem by Czeslaw Milosz: . . .                        Love Love means to learn to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart, Without knowing it from various ills A bird and a tree say to him: Friend. Then he wants to use himself and things So that they stand in the glow of ripenes

First Impressions...

Finished the book that has had a few rounds on this blog: The Cave . As a general practice, after finishing a novel, I rush to find some well written reviews on the book that I'd picked, held and savoured literally. :-) The reason for this hasn't got so much to do with the desire to know more on the themes etc. , as it is with the immediate and natural feeling to share your reading with someone. And since I normally end up in vain in finding reciprocating voices to share something like reading, one of the best things to do is to search and find few other pages of writing which, given a chance, could speak to you about that reading on similar terms of understanding. It also helps to come across varying points of view ( find many I argue with vehemently :) ). Anyway, to review the book on my own is going to utilise energy elsewhere and for another time ( hope that comes soon), but what takes most of my imagination, after stepping over the threshold of a novel's ending, is

Reading of a book

Read some pages from Saramago’s The Cave today. I am so delighted to read these lines that I want to share them with you. Couldn’t help it really. I am halfway through this novel. It is a simple story about a small family. The head of the family, Cipriano Algor, wakes up early in the morning one day, to complete some work. He gets up and decides to go out and see the following:         “The dense foliage of the mulberry tree still had a firm grip on night, it would not let it leave just yet, the first dawn twilight would linger for at least another half an hour. He glanced at the kennel then looked around him, surprised not to see the dog. He gave a low whistle, but there was still no sign of Found. The potter went from perplexed surprise to outright concern, I can’t believe he’s just gone, he muttered. He could call out the dog’s name, but he did not want to alarm his daughter. He’ll be out there somewhere, on the trail of some nocturnal creatur

QuoteS of the day

  Feel like posting some quotes with the word 'echo'.    Activities like reading, writing, and thinking, essentially have words at their disposal as echoes of something I mightn't be able to name. Perhaps that's the reason we should let these echoes be. As is presented time and again by authors of good literature, something becomes an irrefutable spark which is given some form with the bits we call words. These echoes belong to everyone; and that is why the creator shares it by freeing it from the struggling, fidgeting artist's inadvertent grasp.   "Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening."                                                                   — Rainer Maria Rilke   "for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a

On this Day...

September the 6th, 1847; Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden Pond and moves in with Ralph Emerson and his family at Concord. There are people who are not fascinated by numbers and I ought to respect their relative nonchalance in upholding logic and reason, but probably for the sake of posterity alone, I shall talk about the book he published much later. In Walden, or Life in the Woods, Thoreau recounts his experience of two years, two months and two days of time spent on the site he must have beheld in a state of freedom. He writes:           "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as t

Echo of the day

"The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and straight-forward, while intelligence is tortuous and sneaky. Intelligence is crooked, while stupidity is honest."          ~ Dostoevsky, Ivan, in The Karamazov Brothers Re-imagining some of the passages from this book is a pleasure. The book has a rare quality of warmly adopting and embracing the reader. A voice from this book is echoing in my head. Above quoted words of the character, Ivan, clearly reflects not only on the beautiful paradox found with human beings, but also on the tripatrite design of the text which is perfeclty balanced between the lives of the three borthers. While Ivan's words characterise his brother Dmitri's straight-forwardness, they dawn upon his own person as an honest confession to be what he is: a thinker. As a third, these words encapsulate the nature of the youngest of them, Alyosha, since he is both; a sythesis of these indubitably human characteristics, and the paradox personified.   

A Reply to 'Ten things' and more...

     "I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old."          ~  Charles  Baudelaire Few days ago, I came across a post by my friend. It talked about one's childhood memories; things that seem to've been slipped from one's mind long ago, but come to life in the blink of the mind's eye. Objects, paper, photographs, cards, various things, which bear the stamp of one's lived experience, weave moments in time that are etched somewhere forever.      Reading about the discovery of a person's realization of time spent in happiness, imagination and vigour, leads you towards your own memories triggered out of nowhere; a place made up of no place; perhaps from what we call the recesses of the mind.     Reminiscing about a past that has surely passed but left its permanent mark - like some undying embers in a distant field, witnessed on a silent evening in a corner of one's world, I feel driven to underline the impressions of the lanes of