Recommendation of the week

Found this lovely letter on www.brainpickings.org by John Steinbeck who had written this to his teenage son who had fallen in love. It is absolutely beautiful and worth many many reads.

New York
November 10, 1958
Dear Thom:
We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.
First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.
Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.
You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.
But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.
Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.
If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.
Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.
We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.
And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
Love,
Fa

SOURCE: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/12/john-steinbeck-on-love-1958/



 

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?"

I couldn't have found a better headline than this. Completely agree with Mr Ernest Hemingway.

Actually, this is not even a headline. This is the gist of what you are about to read.

We all love to sleep. At least most people I know. Most people consider sleeping as a part of their symmetrical routinely lives.

For me, sleep is one of the most important things I live for.

Recently, I have taken a conscious decision to do some things that I have never done before (Yes, my quarter life crisis has lasted for much longer than I would have imagined). So one of those things was to get up in the morning and go to the sea face for a "morning walk". Man, people talk about it with so much gusto, so much passion, so much normalcy that I thought I really must be missing out on some sort of experience since I have never ever gotten up early in the morning to walk/jog or do any form of exercise. The only reason I would ever get up between 5 to 8 am in the morning is when I have a god-forsaken flight to catch or other such extreme form of torture.

Anyhow, getting back on the walking track. Yesterday, I went for the first ever "morning walk" of my life at 7.02 am at the beautiful, picturesque and rainy Carter Road. Geared up in my shorts, shoes, music and a red umbrella, it definitely was a unique experience. And now I at least I can talk to my grandchildren with some sort of authority when I tell them that getting up so early in the morning for a walk/jog/exercise is so Highly Overrated. Clearly, I can have that experience any fucking time of the day, and it would thankfully be devoid of the misery, torture, nausea and dizziness of early mornings.  

Early mornings are meant for sweet sleep. They are meant to make you believe that everything is fabulous. You are fabulous. Early mornings are meant for amazing dreams, dreams of wilderness, zany dreams, incomprehensible dreams and forgettable dreams. The best sleep of the whole night is often lovingly gifted to you by glorious early mornings. The early morning sleep (actually sleep in general) comforts me the way nothing and no-one can. I love sleep from the bottom of my bottomless heart.

Here is to sleep. Here is to early morning sleep. Here is to never ever getting up early in the morning for "morning-walks/jogs/exercise".

Post 8.30-9 a.m, I am up for anything. Now let us talk about breakkie, wine, work, coffee, eggs, sugar, love and other such things.

The Missing People

This poem has been completely inspired by these images of "missing people" by Graham McIndoe 
via www.flavorwire.com


They are holed up in life,
Or freed in death?
Nobody knows.
They are the missing people.

The shadow of their identity,
Translated into paper,
With a pleading hope,
With a hopeful plead.
They are the missing people.

They are crushed, they are wrinkled,
They are creased,
They are in throes of winter,
They are the missing people.
Years go by, their skin doesn't age
Centuries multiply, they lie wide awake,
The posters wither, the skin dries up.
They are the missing people. 

They are the answers,
They are the rhetorical questions.
They rise like a duststorm,
And settle down into a pile of nothing.
They are the missing people.  

Recommendation of the week: A Seperation

So finally over the weekend, I managed to watch Asghar Farhidi's A Separation which is the first Iranian movie to have won the Oscar in the best foreign language movie category. I would like to begin talking about the movie with its end. It is one of the most beautiful endings I have ever seen. It is simple, yet mind-blowing. It lingers on, till the last credit and then smoothly flows through the screen to be with you for quite sometime. 

The script of the movie is pretty interesting. There is no mystery as such but the film keeps taking these interesting turns that make you feel you are watching some sort of strongly interlinked stories, but stories which can just strongly exist on their own too. The film is full of interesting women characters including the two wives and the two daughters and still its not really a feminist story. The filmmaker also pays a lot of attention to details. I like the scene where the accused husband (you will know who I am talking about once you watch the movie), comes to the kitchen and his estranged wife is shown just stubbing the cigarette in the balcony. The wife is almost in the background , out of focus, but is smoking. May be it is just completely my interpretation, but its a very subtle smartly executed scene to sort of show the modernity of a a bourgeois Iranian woman. (I do not mean that smoking a cigarette depicts modernity but it kind of does in this particular context) And because of all the brouhaha in Iran, its done so subtly, in a blink and miss fashion.

There is no massive high or low points in the film, which probably has not worked in my favour. It is very very difficult to sympathize or stay with any character in the movie, the accused, the accuser, the liar, anyone. And this is completely my problem and a pretty much wrong thing to do, but I kept thinking about Jafar Panahi, one of my most favourite directors, while watching the movie. Yes, yes, I know that comparing two filmmakers is not a very intelligent thing to do but like I said, I missed Panahi. His films, even the apparently most simplistic ones, always manage to make me sit up, draw a huge breath and say 'wow'. They have a very Iranian appeal to them if you know what I mean. And except for a few intrinsic minute details, 'A Separation' could have been based anywhere, even in India.

However, 'A Separation' is a must watch, for a simple yet complicated slice of life of normal everyday people and everyday issues in Iran. And for the subtle hints to the whole conflict for a lot of people who want to stay in their homeland and want to get out of it, at the same time. That is the beginning of the film.

'Mayakovsky' by Frank O'Hara

My heart's aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it's throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.

I love you. I love you,
but I'm turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.

Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I'll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embrace a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.

That's funny! there's blood on my chest
oh yes, I've been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Frank O'Hara

How George Clooney has made a difference to my life

How George Clooney has helped me is definitely not through schadenfreude but something pretty close to it. I know that it is humanly possible to feel some kind of delight in other people's misfortune. Fortunately or Unfortunately, I have not reached that stage yet. It is a truth universally acknowledged that loneliness is not partial towards anyone. It is pretty generous as a matter of fact. You can have as much of it as you want, in abundance. Sometimes you will feel guilty by partaking too much of it. It is charming, interesting, creative and everything but it also makes you miserable, desperate and sometimes a weird version of yourself.

So anyhow, the point is that we all know that there is no dearth of broken souls marred by loneliness. You don't really feel special when you are lonely. However, when you read that the Most handsome, one of the most amazing actors, an icon, a Roman god (Greek is too cliche for Clooney), this man who defines cool feels lonely, then you feel a bit special. Atleast I do. Like I said, it is not schadenfreude, I don't feel happy about Clooney being lonely, an alcoholic, an insomniac, but if the universe can make George Clooney suffer from all this then....

Unobvious similarities between things

"Writers can sound rather mystical when they talk about these things. Words like inspiration and creativity I’m really rather suspicious of, though I can’t talk about my work for more than thirty seconds without deploying them myself. Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale."

"One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn’t work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It’s world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache."

David Mitchell
(Source: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction-no-204-david-mitchell)