Niharika > Recent Status Updates

Some are born in their place, some find it, some
realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.

He
conducts his literary explorations inward, toward the core of what supports him physically and
spiritually. He belongs to an honorable tradition, one that even in America includes some great
names: Thoreau, Burroughs, Frost, Faulkner, Steinbeck – lovers of known earth, known
weathers, and known neighbors both human and nonhuman. He calls himself a “placed” person.

I doubt that we will ever get the motion out of the Americans, for everything in his
culture of opportunity and abundance has, up to now, urged motion on him as a form of virtue.

2. He is talking about the knowledge of place that comes
from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving
its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling
that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is
talking about the knowing that poets specialize in.

1.Back to Wendell Berry, and his belief that if you don’t know where you are you don’t
know who you are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking
at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the
memory, the history of a family or a tribe.

2. In our displaced condition we are not unlike the mythless man that Carl Jung wrote about, who lives
“like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. He . . . lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered
truth.”

1.Indifferent to, or contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better, hooked on change, a lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it.

2. Some days I took out a cycle and rode ten miles along the Karapur Forest Road, sat on a wayside culvert, and wrote or brooded over life and literature, watching some peasant ploughing his field, with a canal flowing
glitteringly in the sun."

1. "Soon after morning coffee and bath" - it is Narayan in Laxmipuram - "I took my umbrella and
started out for a walk. I needed the umbrella to protect my head from the sun. Sometimes I carried a
pen and pad and sat down under the shade of a tree at the foot of Chamundi Hill and wrote.

"There are two types of realist", Frost once said. "There is the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real potato. And there is the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I am inclined to be the second kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form."

But for the spiritually rich heroes of antiquity, it is their egos, their ordinary selves, that are rent in order to give way to the sublime. In our modern version, the hero’s self is not transmuted by spirit but inflated by violence. This is a dangerous direction for heroism to take.

Fear of ghosts

Countless golden stars, twinkling in rivalry, seemed all running softly towards the MilkyWay, and truly,looking at them,you were almost conscious of the whirling, never-resting motion of the earth.

2. And every day, the first thing in the morning, my ‘beautiful heart’ exudes this infusion and bathes in it till night. I know this happens with others if somebody dies suddenly, if the most important being on earth dies suddenly. But with me this is an eternal condition.
At least understand this.

1.“And I look, and I see, and for that reason, I’m sorrowful. And I don’t believe that any one of you has dragged around within himself this bitter, bitter mish-mash. I’m in a quandary over saying what this mishmash is composed of, and, all the same, you would never understand, but mostly there’s ‘sorrow’ and ‘fear’ in it. ‘Sorrow’ and ‘fear’ most of all and, then, muteness.

2.Just universal chicken-heartedness. I’d agree to live on the earth for an eternity if they’d show me first a corner where there’s not always room for valor.
“Universal chicken-heartedness.” Indeed this is the panacea, this is the predicate to sublime perfection. And as for nature’s activist inclinations . . .

1.Oh, if only the whole world, if everyone were like I am now, placid and timorous and never sure about anything, not sure of himself nor of the seriousness of his position under the heavens – oh, how good it could be. No enthusiasts, no feats of valor, nothing obsessive!

A most dangerous temptation is the temptation to prepare to live, instead of living. The future does not belong to you. Therefore, remember to live the best way you know now. The only perfection necessary is perfection in love, which can be reached only in the present. It’s why we came into this world.
The present is the moment in which the divine nature of life is revealed.
God exists in this time.

Real science studies and makes accessible that knowledge which people at that period of history think important, and real art transfers this truth from the domain of knowledge to the domain of feelings.
Creating art is not as elevated a thing as many people guess, but certainly it is a useful and kind thing to do, especially if it brings people together and arouses kind feelings in them.

There is only one real knowledge: that which helps us to be free. Every other type of knowledge is mere amusement.
—V ISHNU PURANA

Because love isn’t like fame. It’s not something other people bestow on you. It’s not something that comes from outside.
Love is something you do.
Love is something you generate.
And loving other people really does turn out, in the end, to be a genuine way of loving yourself.

But you can give the love you long for out to the world. You can be the love you wish you had. That’s the way to be okay. Because giving love to other people is a way of giving it to yourself.”

?o you want to be a person who burns with anger—or shines with compassion? ?o you want to be hopeful or hopeless? Give up or keep going? Live or die?”

" Painting isthebest of all arts, conducive to dharma, pleasure, wealth and emancipation.It gives the greatest pleasure, when placed in a house."
Vishnudharmoltara,Ch.43, V. 38.

" He who paints waves, flames, smoke and streamers fluttering in the air, according to the movement of the wind,should be con-sidered a great painter."
Vishnudharmottara,Oh.43, V.28,

C a c a y , C a s s i af i s t u l a , L i n .

To tell the truth is the same as to be a good tailor, or to be a good farmer, or to write beautifully. To be good at any activity req uires practice: no matter how hard you try, you cannot do naturally what you have not done repeatedly. In order to get accustomed, you should tell only the truth, even in the smallest of things.
We lie to other people so often that we get used to it, and we start to lie to ourselves.

W e have to fulfill honestly and irreproachably the work destined for us. It does not matter whether we hope that we will become angels some day, or believe that we have originated from slugs.
—JOHN RUSKIN

Today we thirst for and are nauseated by totalitarian-ism, and nearly everyone loves one totalitarianism and hates another.

But it is said that in Europe the blemishes existed in spite of the perfection of Christianity and that in the other civilizations they existed because of the imperfection of religion.
An outstanding example, to be carefully pondered, of the technique of error—setting aside. In estimating the value of India or Greece, we compare the good with the evil. In estimating the value of Christianity, we set the evil aside.