Reverberations - I

When I went home last week, I rearranged all my books and other stuff, threw away all unwanted stuff. Then I saw this diary in which I had written down my favourite passages from the books I had read when I was in college. It's been almost 13 years, but still those passages remain my favourites because they seem to be relevant and valid whenever I read them. Also, those are lines which I felt, could have come from my mind or anybody thinking similar, but did not, for whatever reason. What I wanted to express, somebody had already expressed and that is why some writers become our favourites. We feel that there exist certain people in this world to think along with us. Kundera is not my favourite, but some of his thoughts are. Pirsig is outstanding and one in a million.
I want to store those passages online, so that even if I lose my diary, I can find it on the blog.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached.

He seems so close at times, and yet the closeness has nothing to do with what is asked or said. Then at other times he seems very far away and sort of watching me from some vantage point I don’t see. And then sometimes he’s just childish and there’s no relation at all. Sometimes, when thinking about this, I thought that the idea that one person’s mind is accessible to another’s is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically alien creatures seem plausible, and that really the relationship of one person to another is ultimately unknowable. The effort of fathoming what is in another’s mind creates a distortion of what is seen.

And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way. There is only one access to him that I can see as passable and we still have a way to go.

From Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
Extremes means border beyond which life ends and a passion for extremism in art and politics is a veiled longing for death.

Franz on the other hand, was certain that the division of life into private and public spheres is the source of all lies: a person is one thing in private and something quite different in public. For Franz, living in truth meant breaking down the barriers between the private and the public. He was fond of quoting Andre Breton on the desirability of living 'in a glass house' into which everyone can look and there are no secrets.

From Life is Elsewhere (Milan Kundera)
This is the basic situation of immaturity. (...) the person banished from the safe enclosure of childhood longs to go out into the world, but because he is afraid of it he construct an artificial, substitute world of verse. He lets his poems orbit around him like planets around the sun. He becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as an infant inside its mother, for everything is constructed out of the familiar materials of his own soul.

More to come...but some time later..

Vibrations

Sometimes I dont know what to do with all my surging energy levels. I feel like embracing the universe. I think I am recharging myself too much with solitude and not giving a chance to dissipate!