Seize the Day

For Nichole:

It is not down in any map; true places never are.
----Herman Melville

Did that other, older place really exist or did we dream it, wish it that way? When one is young nothing is more real to us than the day we live; nothing is more real (though irrelevant) than the day that has passed. This is quite the opposite when we grow older. The past is another country.

I described Lahore to someone as a very large village of seven million people.They replied:

Don't you know it was once the capital of the Mughal Empire.

But Lahore is the centre of the world (if not the universe) and has no concern for the passing splendour of insignificant things like an Empire! She remains a ramshackle collection of villagers, acrobats, vagabonds, prostitutes, pimps, dreamers, poets, broken-hearted fools, bumpkins, fanatics, pseudo-intellectuals, and malicious gossipers (and that's just the elite!) Nowhere else will you see someone dress up in a housecoat, burn fires in the late afternoon, start the day at eleven o'clock or people sweep up rubbish in the early morning fog with such grace, one arm behind their backs. The aim always, and everywhere, is to do nothing. With wonderful indifference the Lahori will characteristically say, If not, then not.

The old, run down part of Lahore is still called the inner city-and rightly so, because what remains but memories? ; for the Lahori his city is greater than Mecca. He who hasn't seen Lahore hasn't been born, so they say.

This is the way things were, the way things are. Lahore, eternal Lahore, indestructible to the very end.
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Was listening to a tribute to John Arlott. Some of his famous quotes:

1. Of Derek Randall, a cricketer bursting with nervous energy:
"And he walks to the crease like an unmade bed."

2. Of a cover drive played by Wally Hammond:
"And the whole of summer was rolled into that one stroke."

I like that. Everything summarised by a single action or phrase, like volo ut sis.

When someone says something that distills the whole story down to a simple but elegant phrase, when they can say that it "all boils down to" in a poetic way then we say: he has caught the whole river in a small cup.
---Swami.

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The Dougal tells me of a Turkish man who has joined the BNP. They call him half-wog!

Was reading that there were 60,000 Mandaeans in Iraq in the 1990's; there are now just over 5,000.

Reading the story of Toni Balestra. Walking back home after appearing on University Challenge he stops, inexplicably, to help someone having trouble starting his car. The man offers him a lift. The car crashes. Toni cannot remember anything that happened after. That was 1975. Thirty two years on he has near perfect memory of events prior to the accident but nothing-not even short term memory-after. It is as if life has stopped at that precise moment, as if the whole of one's life depended on that one fatal decision. One juncture in time structuring the whole of time.

Plenty Coups says of life in the reservation: And then nothing happened.
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The more I think about Bellow's Seize the Day the more I think of its religious undertones. Reading backwards always means we read another book. The main protagonist changes his name, tries to find his real name, which is the freedom of the individual, not of the generations, the species.

And the father refuses to carry the son's burdens. He will have to suffer on his own to come to the truth: I am not going to pick up a cross. I'll see you dead, Wilks, by Christ...

On the chaos of a life with no order of the soul, a life that isn't strung together in any theme but only progresses in fits and starts: Everything was like the faces of a playing card, upside down, either way.

Wilks must learn: Bringing people into the here-and-now.The real universe. That's the present moment. The past is no good to us..Only the present is real.

And what is real, what is imaginary?
Dark-tinted mirrors, kind to people's defects.

The worst kind of people always want to look at you in a clear mirror or a camera. But extreme beauty (and ugliness..Medusa) cannot be perceived directly. What is the right way to look?

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own which he figured out by private thinking..you had to translate and translate, explain and explain, and it was the punishment of hell not to understand or be understood and yet the real soul says plain and understandable things to everyone..There sons and fathers are themselves, and a glass of water is only an ornament; it makes a hoop of brightness on the cloth; it is an angel's mouth. There truth for everybody may be found...