Quintessential

Better to be a diamond with a flaw than a stone that is perfect.

I have begun to notice that the more active the rest of the world becomes, the more slowly I move, and that my solitude increases in the same proportion as its racket and frenzy.

—Saul Bellow, Dangling Man.

Everything moves to a specific calculation, everything has an appointed time. The monsoon season starts on the 15 th of July, year in year out. That’s just the way it is. So too the spring which officially begins in the second week of February. It is as if our thought and actions all happen within circles that are beyond our comprehension. There is a kind of perfection to a regularity that escapes the mind though to others it only instills dread and fear.

The dust storms are more irregular. Great howling winds batter whitewashed walls, depositing huge amounts of debris to one side of the world. and still the rain doesn’t come. It is likewatching a silent movie. But occasionally they also signify something much more important, more mysterious. In 1946 the sky turned an ominous red during one such storm says the swami. People said that this was because of all the people that had been killed during the year as the violence of partition began to take full swing.

“But have you ever seen such a sky again?”

Swami: “No, because now the killing is a commonplace.”

It is the first day of Ramadan. The most difficult thing is orienting one’s soul to it. The soul will follow the body, one hopes.

Watching a re-run of one of the old Star Trek episodes. In it the Medusans, a race of sublimely intelligent , disembodied people have to be transferred from one place to another. But their form is so hideous, so grotesque, that it must be hidden from the eyes of Man. One glance is enough to drive a man to madness, to murder. There are some realities that one must turn one’s eyes away from, that can blind us.

Is there any way in which we can attune our vision to such a sight? Perhaps we can only see our own ugliness . Then the ambassador who wants to see the Medusa and not just know its mind, its supreme intelligence, asks who isto say what is beautiful and what is ugly. May it not be that we cannot see the Medusa because it is dazzlingly beautiful? Our eyes must rove since that cannot absorb the picture of somethingof that is so spectacularly beautiful. Both the absence of light and an excess of it produces blindness.

From Calvino, On Lightness:

Perseus, who is carried by the wind, the clouds, slays Medusa- the one who turns souls to stone, whose gaze is the weight and inertia of the world. But still he carries her head with him in a bag: as if to say that in a ‘thoughtful lightness’ one cannot look directly at reality but only its reflection. One doesn’t refuse reality, but carries the opacity of the world with one. Melancholy is not a dense, brooding inwardness, but a sadness that has taken on lightness.