New Learning: Round 5

(Earlier rounds here.)

Is reading a book (by which I mean literary fiction) mandatory for leading a wise life?

Last year in a post on the Facebook page, I mentioned how there has never been a better time for books and people who like to read than the present time. Yet people keep complaining that nobody reads. Even though the evidence points to the contrary. A recent survey showed that millennials are out reading older Americans, and are buying more books rather than borrowing them. (Much to the publishers delight, you’d suppose.) Of course, if you walked around with your eyes open you'd not need a survey to see that. 

Fact is that since reading became something that humans do, there have always been some people who “liked to read a lot” and many who didn’t. But is reading books necessary to lead a purposeful life? In my life I have come across many people who don’t read books (some don’t know how to read) and yet are living meaningful lives, even happy lives if that is what you prefer. After all, reading– especially reading for pleasure– is a privilege. (And obviously related to social class, but that is better left for some other forum.)

I am happy to note that Tim Parks recently shared similar sentiments in ‘Reading Upwards’.  

“What no one wants to accept—and no doubt there is an element of class prejudice at work here too—is that there are many ways to live a full, responsible, and even wise life that do not pass through reading literary fiction. And that consequently those of us who do pursue this habit, who feel that it enriches and illuminates us, are not in possession of an essential tool for self-realization or the key to protecting civilization from decadence and collapse. We are just a bunch of folks who for reasons of history and social conditioning have been blessed with a wonderful pursuit.”

He also makes another point that I have made many times before that people who enjoy reading Chetan Bhagat/ Dan Brown aren’t going to move onto Manto/Shakespeare. That is a ruse of publishers who only seek a growing bottom line, yet control what people get to read.

That brings me to the second point: Now that the traditional publishing industry is, shall we still whisper it, moving towards an (inevitable?) end, what does it mean for the “world of books”?

I know people who bemoan the end of books as they know it, mostly those who claim to “read a lot”– those who have books lying around on the floor everywhere and so on. Some get to write about it– mostly white people, especially white men of a certain age who have benefited (not just monetarily) the most from the existing structure of the publishing industry. (I don't need to post hyperlinks to prove how whitest white and male dominated the world of publishing and published books really is, do I?). And then I see that people I know are in the process of writing or have written books– especially women of color– many, even a few years back, would have deemed the idea of getting published impossible. In part this is due to the rise of self-publishing and online literary magazines. (In traditional publishing/media the bias is still towards stories told from the point of view of a white person/or what they’d want to read.) Never in the history of human society have so many people written or are in the process of writing books. They may not be writing War and Peace but that may be simply because that’s not what they want to write– at least not in that form.

Which brings me to the most perplexing issue: what exactly is a book? Is it a place where stories live? Growing up in India, I learnt fairly early in life that stories weren’t imprisoned in books– they were free flowing long rhymes, and layered episodes which a person could narrate from memory for days, without a single piece of inked paper in sight. After all, stories have existed since before the invention of paper and the advent of the printing press. And these were truly democratic stories; every narrator would freely add to the existing framework and create something new, while staying close to the original text and its other versions. Consider the epic Ramayana and its several versions: each narrator would borrow from, critique, build on earlier versions and thus carry forward the story. A reason why the story has stayed alive for so long– a version exists to appeal to the sensibilities of every listener down the years.

As A.K. Ramanujan pointed out sometimes the real value of the story lies not in the fact that it resides in a book, but that someone is “really listening to the story” (see page 15 of his essay "Three Hundred Ramayanas").

And let’s not even get started on the gibberish regarding e-readers. All opposition simply confusing the medium for the message: books and e-readers are the medium, not the message. I am fortunate to have some members in my family who have never known a world without the internet. It helps keep my arrogance in check (“things as they were in my time are the way things should always be” that sort of things). For everyone else, here are some of the sanest words ever written on how we perceive any new technology:

“I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.”

– Douglas Adams, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

Rainy Day Thoughts

I am holding Granta's May edition titled ‘Britain’ in my hands, and staring at the cover all I can think of is:

And the crack in the tea cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.*

How strange this connection between man and poetry. 

If you have ever read a poem and felt the lines spoke to you; they articulated your thoughts and hopes then you'd understand why 'In relation to the future, a poem is like a note sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea'. Charles Simic in a recent post in NY review of books states, “If poetry is not the most utopian project ever devised by human beings, I don’t know what is”. You’ll have to read Simic’s post to work out how (or even whether) this sentiment applies to your understanding of poetry. For words and the constant misunderstanding of the intent behind them could, if one is pressed for a quick response, be summarized as the sum total of the drama that is human existence. Though one would, perhaps, end with a flourish– ‘all existence is meaningless’.

Talking about meaning and misunderstanding, or should it be called different ways of understanding, the poem that comes to mind is Yeats ‘The Second Coming’**. Lines from this poem get quoted with regular frequency whenever the world has faced a crisis in recent history, just like Keynes during an economic crisis. And just like Robert Frost and the end of 'The Road Not Taken' (it is the sigh– I shall be telling this with a sigh––that makes one pause and consider the road not taken), here too it is the last few lines that have been widely interpreted.

Though if you read the poem carefully and ‘see’ the vast image brought forth by the Spiritus Mundi (spirit of the world) would you still believe that the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem could be our saviour? And if you read about Yeats and his theory of gyres then the doubts will recede further.

Why does a poet write? Why does a reader read? Sometimes these seem like questions worth considering, though most of the time a person pens a few lines and moves on. Another person reads them and moves on. Just like life.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.***

*W.H. Auden, As I walked out one evening.

**TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Interesting trivia: The Second Coming has not only been quoted in many books, comics and music albums, but also has been the source of the titles of some very popular books:

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

***The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald.

How to be a bad bird watcher

How to be a bad birdwatcher by Simon Barnes

Look out of the window.
See a bird.
Enjoy it.
Congratulations. You are a bad birdwatcher.

With these simple sentences Simon Barnes opens the doors to the most engaging and pleasurable of all human activities. Bird watching. Every human is a birdwatcher. Rather a bad birdwatcher. Ever since as a two year old you chased pigeons in the park you have unknowingly taken another step further down the trail of human fascination with birds as stamped upon this earth by your long-forgotten ancestors.

Why do we watch birds? Birds are colourful, they fly, they sing and they are about hope – that thing with feathers. How can any mere mortal be immune to such tantalizing charms? Which more than adequately explains Simon Barnes joy at spotting a “shikara - a jet-propelled Asian hawk - when covering a cricket match in Bangalore.” Everyone seems to have at least one happy memory that is indelibly linked with birds. Though it may not be their RSPB moment, as yet.

To appreciate why birds are the most studied and documented of all living creatures, why hanging out peanuts for blue tits is an act of revolution, how there is “something childlike about the best of bird watching”, how bird places aren’t important because bird watching is a nice hobby, how magpies are just being magpies and succeed very well at being that and how observing England footballers compares with watching birds you just need to walk through Simon Barnes authoritative tome on How to be a bad bird watcher.

And if along the way you begin to appreciate where humans stand in the wider living world and join Mr Barnes to sing a paean to the greater glory of life just think to yourself what a wonderful world it would be.

(Afterthoughts on books: part 10)

The Crack-Up

The Crack-Up with other Pieces and Storiesby F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down…” thus begins The Crack-Up one of the most personal pieces ever written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Watching the world, as we know it collapse around us or rather irrevocably break down and searching for ways to paste together whatever is left of human civilization these words become even more poignant. For Fitzgerald, the voice and conscience of the Jazz Age, was chronicling a similar decline albeit of the 1930’s.

The pent up energy lying waste during the years of the First World War unleashed the ‘Roaring Twenties’ when the soaring American stock market obliterated everything that was perceived as traditional. It was an era dominated by Modernism, Art Deco and all sorts of new advancements like the automobile, air travel and the telephone, which eventually collapsed in a heap of insignificance with the coming of the Great Depression. Leading Fitzgerald to ponder over how and why he ended up “…mortgaging myself physically and spiritually to the hilt”. His scathing self-analysis leads him to a new dispensation however “…just as the laughing stoicism, which has helped the American Negro to endure the terrible conditions of his existence, has cost him his sense of the truth – so in my case there is a price to pay. I do not any longer like the postman…nor the cousin’s husband, and he in turn will come to dislike me, so that life will be never very pleasant again, and the sign Cave Canem is hung permanently above my door.”

Just like the The Crack-Up, the other pieces and stories in this collection deal with not just Fitzgerald’s personal experiences but with how an entire generation had to face up to challenges for which most were neither physically nor emotionally prepared. It wasn’t just a matter of adapting to a changing lifestyle but a far more serious issue of debating human values and what we would choose to paste together when everything around us gets broken down.

The parallels between the early years of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century run so close together that beyond a point they seem to be mirror images of each other. And the development of human societies appears to be trapped in this endlessly ride over the waves of a boom followed by a bust. Whereby we end up with letting go of more than we collectively gain.

Even Esquire, which first published The Crack Up in 1936, felt the time was opportune enough to republish it. However the fact that they linked Fitzgerald’s critical self-analysis with Britney Spear’s breakdown speaks volumes about the era we live in and what we’ll choose to preserve when it all comes down. You can read The Crack- Up here .

(Afterthoughts on books: part 9)

Reading Saki

The Collected Short Stories of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)

Oh joy! Just the thought that you’ll get to curl up with your old tattered copy of The Collected Short Stories of Saki at the end of it all makes even the day especially created to torment and test your deepest emotions seem like a party. The hatred, for lack of a stronger word, you feel towards your fellow beings will receive just the right kind of comeuppance at the hands of Reginald and Clovis. Every hypocrisy and idiocracy will be laid bare and branded as such. Oh the tears of joy and laughter! And finally, you’ll bring another day to a close with that big smile on your face.

Ah! The sublime delights of reading Saki. You don’t remember when you first entered this wonderland for now it seems to have been always there; your hidden paradise. The much needed secret valley where you can escape from the trails and tribulations of interacting with human society. No wonder Christopher Morley in 1930 remarked, “There is no greater compliment to be paid to the right kind of friend than to hand him Saki without comment.” And rightly so. You can’t indiscriminately pass around the keys to the gates of paradise.

You may be living in a dump in some corner of this wide world. Your patience almost frayed beyond repair. You’ll have sipped tea in silence with many a people whom you are convinced “would be enormously improved by death”. Then Reginald on the Academy will say, “Every reformation must have its victims. You can't expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return.” Or Clovis, The Match Maker, will coolly extrapolate, “All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's. A few gifted individuals manage to do both.” While Conradin will slowly chant, “Sredni Vashtar went forth, His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white, His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death. Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.” cajoling his wonderful god to do that one thing for him. Thus the gathering dark clouds of gloom and doom will lift and you’ll be safely home.

Sometimes a few words will be enough to redress the balance:
We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart. (The Unbearable Bassington)
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a lot of explanations. (The Comments of Moung Ka)
I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly. (Reginald on Worries)
The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally. (The Jesting of Arlington Stringham)
Whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somewhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then. (Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped)

And so, when a new day will dawn you’ll sit and endure the same old circumlocutions about everything and nothing albeit with a secret smile for you know soon Reginald will ask the gathering of incomparable twits, “What did the Caspian Sea?’ thus clearing your secret pathway to happiness.

(Afterthoughts on books: part 8)

Reading Roald Dahl

You were just a four year old. Tiny, almost too small for your age. At night you slept dreaming of Hanuman and Durga. And Mahishasura. By day you killed Ravana and Raktabeeja with your pencil strokes, a million times. And in between you heard stories of Roald Dahl read by whoever gave into your relentless persuasion.

First there was Charlie and Mr. Willy Wonka and the amazing chocolate factory with the eccentric grandparents and the hapless parents accompanied by your enthusiastic approval of all that followed. Then came Matilda, the child prodigy with her exceptional reading skills, something you are in awe of even today after all these years. The horrid Miss Trunchbull and the voice that read her part still echoes in your mind when you hear her name, making your blood boil.

The Witches profoundly affected your life. You went searching for them armed with the telltale signs described by the grandmother. For you were heart broken at the end when the boy gets transformed into a mouse. In James and the Giant Peach you met your doppelganger albeit with horrible aunts. Yours were charming, loving and everything you wanted aunts to be like. But you wouldn’t have minded to swap places with James for a bit of a surreal adventure with insects. You could never brush off a spider ever again without thinking about it’s young ones.

Fantastic Mr. Fox you simply loved. If you hadn’t been living in Delhi’s concrete jungle you would have definitely laid out a feast for hungry foxes ever night. Instead you fed the stray dogs bread and rotis. But most of all like Sophie you needed to find The BFG. For being friends with a friendly giant would have made the long, dark nights so much more exciting.

One day inevitably you had heard all the stories ever written by Roald Dahl and you hadn’t even turned five yet. Ah the life long regrets it would give rise to.

Eight years later you bemoan the end of childhood wishing you had never grown up. Wondering if life would ever be so delightful. I laugh at your words, echoing the usual platitudes but lacking the courage to reveal the bittersweet truth.

(Afterthought on books: part 7)

Marcovaldo

Marcovaldo or The seasons in the city by Italo Calvino

In a sprawling metropolis where the temperature within and without is always a constant some pleasant degree centigrade where do the seasons go? Caught up in the 9 to 5 or whatever the present state of existence is categorized as, is the change in seasons only visible in the mall windows advertising the “this season” or the “end of whatever’ sale?

What happened to the Marcovaldo in us? One who as Calvino writes, “…would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof -tile; there was… no worm-hole in a plank, or a fig-leaf squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn’t remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of the heart, and the woes of his existence.”

When did we become an overwhelmingly city dwelling species so detached from nature that even a speck of mud on our clean shiny shoes makes us recoil in disgust. Nature; every living being encompassed in that one word, the one thing that makes this pale blue dot unique in the entire galaxy. How did man become so disconnected from life?

Or do the Marcovaldos belong to another world? Stuck here where “The night lasted for twenty seconds, then came twenty seconds of GNAC. For twenty seconds you could see the blue sky…the gilded sickle of the waxing moon…and the stars…to the sprinkle of Milky Way…in great haste…because twenty seconds quickly ended…GNAC took over...part of the neon sign SPAAK COGNAC.” Always looking for that lost something only to realize they are the ones on the verge of losing it all.

The Marcovaldo of the book exists during the early 50’s and mid 60’s Italy when a very poor nation starts gaining illusions of economic prosperity. Time to conserve the remaining Marcovaldos before they become an extinct species in a world peddling delusions of wealth and well being.

(Afterthoughts on books: part 6)

The brief wondorous life of Oscar Wao

The brief wondorous life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

How many people would know what is the capital of Dominican Republic? Or its neighbouring country? In just a few years one forgets everything that was learnt over long, sleepless nights.

How intrinsically is an individual’s life history connected to the history of his country, his people? In a highly globalized world can there ever be a global citizen? At what point in time does one stop being an immigrant, an outsider?

Or as Yunior, the part narrator says, "You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest."

Think of a third world country. Any third world country or especially one that you can’t recall the capital city of or locate on the world map and chances are that it has a very violent history and not surprisingly the first world has played a not too insignificant role in it’s past and present misery.

Or as Junot Diaz puts it so eloquently, “They say it came first from Africa," the novel begins, "carried in the screams of the enslaved … that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku – generally a curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World…No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of the Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve been in shit ever since.”

Time to open that atlas now.

(Afterthought on books: part 5)

After all has been said

Sometimes after you have finished reading a book, as you put it down while the last few words are floating through your mind another thought bursts forth and every other thought gets extinguished. ‘All that needs to be said has been said’. A strange mix of ecstasy and melancholy grips the heart. And you wonder how and why do people still go on writing. Dream of being poets and authors, think they have anything new or fresh to add to the countless reams published and read ever since humans started giving words to their thoughts.

I recently experienced this emotion after finishing Orlando. Actually after the first 20 odd pages itself I was stuck by the abovementioned thought. Only to immediately be stuck by another that this experience was neither unusual nor unprecedented. I myself have felt so innumerable times. After reading Steinbeck’s words, “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” Or Calvino’s, “Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.” Or Saint-Exupery’s, “Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.”

Not to belabour the point I stop at just three random examples. Even as another thought crosses my mind for someone having nothing new to add already 276 words have been expended. Not to mention these.

(Afterthoughts on books: part 4)

Opening the bell jar

A little over three decades into my life I finally get acquainted with you, or rather your doppelganger Esther Greenwood. You, much to our collective sorrow, quit the scene aged just thirty. Forty-six years later I observe Esther feeding her wardrobe to the night wind and watching it being ferried off into the dark heart of New York. And suddenly I am nineteen again.

Wanting to crawl beneath the covers and become unrecognizable. And stay unnoticed. In a moment have a million dreams and then watch fear and expectation tear each one into tiny little pieces. Always inside a bell jar under the watchful microscopic eyes being weighed and measured up to some obscure standards.

I become like all other nineteen year olds who have the one thing in common. They tick the box next to female whenever life puts forth a seemingly simple question. After all the questions have been asked and they have been analyzed, categorized and put in their place; they grow up. And still everything remains unchanged. Even the air inside the bell jar.

Some of us smash the bell jar with our bare fists clasping for fresh air and watch our wrists blossom red. And so, depart. While others suck the staid air and go on. And on. Despite each getting harder by the minute to take breath. With a gasp I now search for the third kind.

(Afterthoughts on books: part 2)