This morning, I was reading Kevin Brockmeir's short story, The Year of Silence in The Best American Short Stories 2008 and I found these lines interesting.

The silence siphoned out of the city and into our ears, spilling from there into our dreams and beliefs, our memories and expectations. In the wake of each fresh episode a new feeling flowed through us, full of warmth and a lazy equanimity. It took us a while to recognize the feeling for what it was: contentment.

Aah...so, methinks my verbosity & prolificity at my blog, on facebook, and lately on Twitter, is perhaps merely a sign of discontentment? The year of my discontentment. (It's been more than a season; else I'd have put the title as "the winter of our discontent" ;))

And unlike the silence of the story, this one is not "plain and rich and deep."

The silence was plain and rich and deep. It seemed infinitely delicate, yet strangely irresistible, as though any one of us could have broken it with a single word if we had not been so enraptured.

And so it goes.... to paraphrase from another line from the story: "In the abundant silence we proceed into ourselves." (The line in the story is exactly the same except it uses "proceeded")

Update: Just finished the story. Lovely! The last paragraph of the story reads:

Every day the silence that had engulfed the city receded further into the past. It was plain that in time we would forget it had ever happened. The year that had gone by would leave only a few scattered signs behidn, like the imprints of vanished shells in the curst of a dried lake bed: the exemplary hush of our elevators, the tangles of useless wire in our walls, and the advanced design of our subway lines, fading slowly into antiquation.

Some day, hopefully all this discontent also recedes "further into the past" and "fades slowly into antiquation"!

--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. - last line of The Great Gatsby nu F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the greatest American novel ever written!

Loved these lines about poetry by Kay Ryan, who was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2008, in an interview in Paris Review.

Interviewer: Do you feel that part of the laureate job is to convince the reading public that poetry is useful?

KR: It's poetry's uselessness that excites me. Its hopelessness. All this tal of usefulness makes me feel I've suddenly been shanghaied into the helping professions. Prose is practical language. Conversation is practical language. Let them handle the usefulness jobs. But of course, poetry has its balms. It makes us less lonely by one. It makes us have more room inside ourselves. But it's paralyzing to think of usefulness and poetry in the same breath.

And so it goes. My daily poetry tweets over on twitter are anything but useful but now I know they serve a purpose - they are a balm which help me make room within myself. 

From later in the interview, this lovely excerpt:

I: Why do you think writing attracted you?

KR: It's a way of thinking unlike any other. Brodsky considers poetry a great accelerator of the mind and I agree. Thinking takes place in language, and it's hard to say whether the language is creating the thinking or the thinkng is creating the language. If I don't write poetry, in the profoundest way I have no way to think.

I: How do you find the subject in a poem

KR: I don't know if I'm interested in combating an idea or just loosening it up. You have to make some room for your mind. You have to open something up. And you can't just slam it from the other side. You can't say, That's not right. This is right. You start fluffing it. You open up the picture, so you can know two things at once.

I love reading interviews with writers and poets! Love the way they think. Love the way they phrase answers. Delectable bits abound! (I flitted between "Poetry has its balms" to "poetry a great accelerator of the mind" to "know two things at once" for this post title!) 

Go pick up the Winter 2008 Paris Review issue and read the interview. Or, if you cannot get your hands on that issue, go to the Paris Review Interview Archive Index and enjoy interviews with the masters of the past. (Past interviews are archived for free as pdf files. (Thank you, Paris Review, for sharing these gems for free.)

Am tweeting about Wallace Stevens today and in addition to his wonderful poetry, I am finding so many great quotes by this esteemed Modernist poet. Here is one that I liked:

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time;   nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure, we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been a part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him to resolve life and the world in his own terms.

The passage is from Stevens' essay "Two or three ideas" (from Opus Posthumous; NYT Review). Though written in prose, it is supposed to be "a great hymn to absence and to the heroically human self."

Over on Twitter, I have been tweeting a poet-of-the-day [1] and wondered yesterday if I had had enough. Perhaps only half a month of celebration (April 1-15) is enough, I dithered. But then I realized that I had focused mainly on US poets. A few (Simic, Ondaatje, Levertov) may have been from other countries originally but they all write/wrote in English. There is so much wonderful poetry that is not written in English ...maybe it is time to celebrate them!

So, for April 16th and 17th (tweeting both together today as, caught in my waffling about whether to continue the series or not, I did not tweet about a poet yesterday), my poets are two poets who have astounded me with their poetry, even in translation. So much so, they have made me want to learn Spanish some day, to be able to enjoy their poetry in its original form. For If their poetry can be so beautiful in translation, imagine how it must be in the original! No... not Lorca (who I am yet to read) but the poets that have me in thrall are Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. I remember finding their poetry in the mid-to-late 1990s and they simply blew me away; especially Neruda. The music in his language, even in translation, is simply astounding. I remember it was a bi-lingual edition and just for the fun of it, I read the Spanish version aloud (not understanding it, of course). What lilt! What music in those words!

Some thoughts now on reading poetry in translation. In my mind, my experience with reading Neruda and Paz is unusual when it comes to reading poetry in translation. I think that in terms of what is lost in translation, it gets progressively worse as one goes from movies to music to books to poems. Over the years, I have read quite a few novels in translation and have wondered how much of the feel of the book was lost in translation. There is no doubt that a bad translator can ruin a book. But how much of the original is lost even when a good translator re-writes a piece? I believe Milan Kundera (one of my favorite authors - read completely in translation) has also battled with translators over this issue and has also written about the perils involved in translation in his non-fiction book, Art of the Novel. (Also read this article about the approach to translation.)

When it comes to movies, I have enjoyed lot of foreign language movies (French, Italian, Chinese, etc.) through sub-titles. Although some of the nuances may be lost through the dialogue, one fares well with movies because a lot of the movie is still retained through the visual aesthetic and in some cases, the music. (Case in point, the music in one of my favorite movies - In the Mood for Love.) Coincidentally, just earlier this week I read some other interesting arguments made comparing movies vs. the written word but that will have to be the topic of another post. (The arguments were put forth by the author Mary Gaitskill in the Introduction to Best New American Voices 2009, which she is the editor of.)

Music, of course, is the universal language... for example, even when I cannot understand the words to the songs, the music from Malian singers that I have been listening to a lot the last few years has given me hours of joy. (Actually, photography, as an art, is also a medium that requires no language and hence does not have to deal with any such barriers.)

Anyways.. I'm off now to find some Neruda and Paz poems to share on Twitter. "Follow" me there.. if you care.
-

[1] After reading at Robert Lee Brewer's blog that some people were celebrating National Poetry Month by writing a poem a day, I decided to start this series of tweets for the month since I have been on Twitter a lot lately and while I do not have the talent or the discipline to write a poem every day, I figured I could put a few tweets every day about a poet of my choice. Its tougher than you think -- when something becomes a daily chore, the fun goes about it!

Poets featured during the first half of the month are:

1. Wannabe poet once upon a time, myself... featuring my "poemkus" (haikus, really...but I use that word to not annoy the purists.)
2. Mark Strand
3. Tess Gallagher
4. Donald Hall
5. Mary Oliver
6. W. S. Merwin
7. Denise Levertov
8. Mark Strand (again! Oops.. Noticing now that this is a repeat!)
9.  -- missed it! -- 
   
10. Philip Levine
11. Michael Ondaatje
12. John Ashbery
    
13. Charles Simic
    
14. John Burroughs (more famous as a naturalist, conservationist, and writer than as a poet but loved couple lines of his poem, Waiting)
    
15. Mark Doty
    

Hmm.. in addition to repeating Mark Strand, I did not realize I missed a day there! I was pretty sure I tweeted one poet every day. #FAIL, as they say in internet lingo! Looks like just about a week into the month, I stumbled! Oh well...

Picked up a book by Willa Cather called Obscure Destinies at the library yesterday. Randomly opened it and came upon this paragraph that starts the short piece, Two Friends.

I loved it and decided to share it here.

Even in early youth, when the mind is so eager for the new and untried, while it is still a stranger to faltering and fear, we yet like to think that there are certain unalterable realities, somewhere at the bottom of things. These anchors may be ideas; but more often they are merely pictures, vivid memories, which in some unaccountable and very personal way give us courage. The sea- gulls, that seem so much creatures of the free wind and waves, that are as homeless as the sea (able to rest upon the tides and ride the storm, needing nothing but water and sky), at certain seasons even they go back to something they have known before; to remote islands and lonely ledges that are their breeding-grounds. The restlessness of youth has such retreats, even though it may be ashamed of them.

Not sure if one is ashamed to go back to such retreats but so it goes...

--
"Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others."-Robert Louis Stevenson

Just ran into this in reading an old essay by the poet, Mark Doty, my poet of the day. (Like I mentioned earlier, I am putting up a few tweets every day on Twitter about a chosen poet for each day this month to celebrate National Poetry Month.)

"We want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering; at the same time we want a poem to be true…and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly."- Auden

That's from Auden's book of prose, The Dyer's Hand. You can read a 1963 review of the book by poet, John Berryman. (Thanks to the New York Review of Books for putting up these old issues online. We would never be able to read these old gems otherwise!)

You can find a good collection of quotes from Auden's poetry via Wikiquotes.

Also, it seems, Auden was a big fan of Tolkien and his Lord of the Ring books! See his NYT Reviews of the first and third books. (Donald Barr wrote the review for the second book.)

And speaking of devils, read Salil Tripathi's excellent article in the Mint today: Of Angels and Devils, which talks about two recent incidents in India.

Incidentally, Salil, who mentions Satanic Verses in the above article, also wrote an excellent piece last week on the 20th anniversary of the publication of that controversial novel. Do read -

Disturbing the universe

After two decades, Rushdie’s controversial masterpiece remains a testimony to freedom of expression and the power of imagination

More articles by Salil from the Mint here.

...and time that lacks the expansive quality! Three great links from kottke.org

1.  An interesting interview with David Foster Wallace on writers 'working on how to be a human being'
  (.. via)


2. What lines to start a piece remembering your father! Maud Newton reminisces. (.. via)

Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge. Nowadays time lacks the expansive quality it had when I was eleven years old. But more than three weeks and less than five months elapsed between the day she moved in and the terrible afternoon he noticed her crouching behind the frosted glass shower door in the front bathroom, and kicked her out.

and last but not least..

3. The Virginia Quarterly Review has made available their entire archive of articles, poems, essays, and book reviews from 1975 to 2003...all online and free to read for all.  .(.. via)

I am eagerly looking forward to two debut novels by people I know -- one who I know fairly well and the other whose blog I have merely followed off-and-on and happened to meet socially during my recent trip to India.

First up, coming this April is Amit Varma's debut book, My Friend, Sancho (Hachette). The book had made the Man Asian Booker longlist ain 2008 and based on the excerpt here, the novel, which is supposed to be a love-story, looks eminently readable. Although Sancho herself does not make her appearance in the excerpt, the suspense created in this short excerpt leaves you eager to find out more about the characters of the book! That's rule # 1 of what a well-written book is supposed to do -- make the reader want to keep turning the pages. In addition to Sancho, more fun is promised in the novel in the form of a talking lizard and a policeman who talks in bullet points. I can't wait for the book to be published!

And in May, Chandrahas Choudhury's debut novel, Arzee the Dwarf (Harper Collins) hits book-stores. Read an excerpt here and be wow-ed. Like I wrote in a comment at that post, if the rest of the book is as good and well-written as the excerpt of Arzee at the wall, I'm going to love it! Chandrahas has made that non-descripit alley come alive... "squelchy slop", "his footprints following him all the way in", "spat into the water, as if expelling the thought" ...and much more to delight. And then there is the whole surreal-ish narrative of Arzee getting on the wall and looking at his reflection in the muck and his  accompanied nostalgic thoughts. Pure poetry!

Here's wishing success to Amit & Chandrahas. Go break a leg, guys!

I just found out that Mark Doty has won the National Book Award for poetry for 2008 (interview) for his book, Fire to Fire - New and Selected Poems. I had seen this book at the Boston public library last month and meant to pick it up soon. Now I will have to!

Other finalists include:

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival - Interview
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day - Interview
Richard Howard, Without Saying - Interview
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler - Interview

Award winners (and finalists) in Fiction and Non-Fiction categories include:

FICTION:

WINNER: Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country - Interview

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project - Interview Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba - Interview Marilynne Robinson, Home - Interview Salvatore Scibona, The End - Interview

NON-FICTION: WINNER: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family -Interview

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War - Interview Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals - Interview Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives - Interview Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order - Interview

Neelkantan brings to my attention, via email, this report at the Literary Saloon about the Sacred Defense Book of the Year awards in Iran:

This is the 12th edition of the event, which is annually held by the Foundation for the Preservation and Publication of Sacred Defense Works and Values (FPPSDWV) to honor writers of books on the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, which is known as the Sacred Defense in Iran.

And the winners are:

• Poetry Section: No work merited the first prize
• Children's Poetry Section: No works deserved the first and third prizes
• Verbal Memory Section: No work was awarded the second prize
• Fiction Section: No entry was given the first prize in this section.
• Fictionalized Biography Section: No work was able to win the first and second prizes
• War and Biography Section: No second or third prize was awarded.
• Literary Research Section: No work was deemed worthy of the first, Second or third prizes in this section.
• Military Research Section: No first or second prize was given.
• Art Section: No work was able to win first, second or third prize in the Drama Section as well as in the Illustration and Photo Section.
• Best Cover Design: No work deserved the first or third prize.

No.. this is no spoof! Apparently, we no longer need the services of The Onion to meet our daily dose of satire and wit! The world is a parody of itself!

This year's Nobel laureate seems like one who I would love to read more of...

the great escapist

In an interview with me in 1997, Le Clezio explained that during this period he was greatly affected by Aldous Huxley's seminal dsytopian tract, Brave New World. This influence is most evident in The Giants, a novel describing a Big Brother-style society of surveillance, founded on the seduction of the consumer and the control of language by "the Masters". With characters called Machines and Tranquillity, trapped in a massive supermarket named Hyperpolis, Le Clezio echoes Huxley's horrific vision of the future in a premonitory portrait of the manipulative power of advertising. The inescapable oppression of modern Western civilisation and the fear of what it might lead to is the essential message that Le Clezio seeks to convey here, and there is little hope for new beginnings or a better way of being in the world. More optimistic insights came to him, however, as he travelled and experienced other cultures. After brief periods working as a teacher in Thailand and a librarian's assistant in Mexico, he spent considerable time in the early '70s living among the Embera indians, deep in the forests of Panama.

more from The Australian here. 

Marilynne Robinson, whose recent novel Home made the 2008 National Book Award Finalists list last week talks about the development of character in writing in an interview in The Paris Review this month.

In the development of every character there’s a kind of emotional entanglement that occurs. The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking. The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

And this later in the interview:

I feel strongly that action is generated out of character. And I don’t give anything a higher priority than character. The one consistent thing among my novels is that there’s a character who stays in my mind. It’s a character with complexity that I want to know better.

Couple more excerpts:

In your second novel, Gilead, the protagonist is a pastor, John Ames. Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?


ROBINSON: I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

....*.....

Ames says that in our everyday world there is “more beauty than our eyes can bear.” He’s living in America in the late 1950s. Would he say that today?

ROBINSON: You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.

At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

Murakami on dreams:

"I don't dream. I use my dreams when I write. I dream when I'm awake. That's the job of a novelist. You can dream a dream intentionally. When you're sleeping and you have a nice dream, you're eating or with a woman, you might wake up at the best part. I get to keep dreaming. It's great."

More excerpts from the interview here, including such gems as:

On Reader's Questions: Apparently Murakami actually answers all of his fan mail personally. "I like stupid questions. A guy sent me an email about squid. He asked 'are their tentacles hands or feet?' I told him he should give a squid ten pairs of gloves and ten pairs of socks and see what happens."

and..

On his favorite music: "I listen to classical music in the morning, jazz in the evening. I listen to rock when I'm driving. I like Radiohead (big round of applause). I like REM, Beck, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thome Yorke is a reader of mine. He's in Tokyo now, and he wanted to meet me, but I had to be here. It's a huge sacrifice for me... I sing "Yellow Submarine" while I swim. It's sounds like bubbling. It's great. I recommend you try it... I loved the Beach Boys when I was younger. I met Brian Wilson when he came to Tokyo. He's strange."

On Berkeley: "Something's wrong with this town."

:)

Two excerpts today, which, apropos of nothing, somehow seem to fit together today.

First, something from the poet Jesse Ball, whose intriguing and creative novel, Samedi the Deafness (NYT review), I started reading today. As is my wont, I googled him to find out more about him and ran into this interview with him and his wife, the Irish writer Þórdís Björnsdóttir, who together have written a book of short stories "concerning the love of Vera and Linus." Here, in an interview, Ball explains what the collaborative aspects of the creative process entails.

In general, great artists are individuals, to be an artist is to gather an aesthetic that’s going to be the whole about yourself. It is a very complicated process and it can brook no admission of another person. It is a single process concerning an individual who’s often excluded from society at that point in their genesis. To find another person, especially in literature, whom you can work with is incredibly rare. In our case, it works really well, especially in the context of this book, since the object of it is to render a certain life. One of the goals when you live together is the creation of a combined life, so you could say that our book is in a way the revisiting of that in a literary sense. You should read the book as if it’s a product of one person’s imagination. Going back and forth and wondering who wrote what is not a pleasurable act.

And the second excerpt is from Hanif Kureishi's novel Intimacy (NYT review) from 1999.

I have been trying to convince myself that leaving someone isn't the worst thing you can do to them. Sombre it may be, but it doesn't have to be a tragedy. If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.

Picture © Sarolta Gyoker, who posted it here.

This morning, I started reading Kundera's Slowness, a book I had kinda perused through some years back but not really read, and really enjoyed this wonderful paragraph:

"Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: 'they are gazing at God's windows.' A person gazing at God's windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for an activity he lacks."

"Gazing at God's Windows" would make for a a great blog's title. :)

Never heard of him before today!

The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country’s greatest living writers.

Bookies be damned, it is a Frenchman that wins again. That makes it 14 French, all men, in 108 years of Nobel awards. ( Not sure if the 14 includes 2000 winner Gao Xingjian, who is a Chinese-born French writer*.) There are 10 Americans in that list, it seems and there apparently is a bias against American authors at the Nobel committee, with the Nobel judge and permanent secretary Horace Engdahl recently saying in an interview:

“The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."

Oh well... my bet on John Updike or Phillip Roth winning one of these days is not going to happen, I guess! (Unless there is a wider backlash against Engdahl's words and so the Nobel committee hands one out next year to an American just to assuage things. Somehow, I doubt it. The Nobel committee cares too hoots about what the New Yorker or other Americans have to say about their choices...(and that's how it should be.)

Anyways, like Marco Roth writes in the Guardian: "The Nobel prize for literature doesn't really have much to do with literary excellence - and that's not a bad thing."... though calling it some irrelevant prize that clueless Swedes hand out does sound like a case of sour grapes and kinda undermines the fact that the Nobel, despite its roots in the literary hinterlands of Scandinavian backwaters, has become the most prestigious literary award.

We want the award to matter as though presented by angels rather than a few, imperfect Swedes with their own biases and tastes.
If we are shocked to discover that politics or some agenda external to mere aesthetics or "excellence", impinges on the judgment of literary work in an international context, we haven't been paying attention. The history of the prize is tied to Alfred Nobel's own broadly humanitarian aspirations to reward those who "have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". Literature will always suffer from this kind of consequentialist standard, and the Swedes recognised this too.

--
* Coincidentally, I picked up Gao Xingjian's book of short stories: Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather at the public library yesterday.

Just read a NYT Sunday Book Review by Garrison Keilor of Julian Barnes's recent book Nothing To Be Frightened Of.

“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him,” the book begins. Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic, has decided at the age of 62 to address his fear of death — why should an agnostic fear death who has no faith in an afterlife? How can you be frightened of Nothing? On this simple question Barnes has hung an elegant memoir and meditation, a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter.

As an agnostic myself, I think some day I will be in a similar position. For now, I muse about Death and my own mortality in the shadows of the grief of my own experience with it this year vis-a-vis my father's death earlier this year. His death made me more acutely aware not merely of my own mortality but also of path till that door is finally shut some day.

Or in Barnes's words:

For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever -- including the jug -- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave.

The Dying Gaul, of which Lord Byron wrote:

He leans upon his hand—his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his drooped head sinks gradually low—
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one...
- Childe Harold, Canto IV (1818), stanzas 140-141.

So, what does it mean to die? What does it entail for those of us who do not believe in an afterlife? These are not questions that are as overwhelming as the 'What is the meaning of life' angst that 20-something year olds ponder about (sometimes!) but is as unanswerable as we muse over it in our late 30s (me) or early 60s (like Barnes.)

Related:

1) The book, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

2) Aubade a beautiful poem about mortality and death by Philip Larkin (from which I took the title of this post):

..
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare.
..

Kinda related:
a) A short story called Revolving Door by T. C. Forrester that I ran into this morning. (PDF at the bottom of the link has the story. The link itself is to an interview with the author.)
b) Julian Barnes had a short story, East Wind, in the New Yorker earlier this year.

"When an asmatic says "I love you," and when an asthmatic says "I love you madly," there's a difference. The difference of a word. A word's a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance."

That's from a short piece called in The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret, (translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston). The book has many such short (1-3 pages usually) but clever and creatively written pieces, which serve as savory quick bites - full of the bitterness, sweetness, and the humor in the asynchronous absurdities and idiosyncrasies of life. His stories cleverly bring forth the surprises, disillusions and the disenchantments of life. Scrumptious! (No.. I am not hungry. Just extending the metaphor of quick bites too far, I suppose! :)) The blurbs from various reviews of his work excerpted at the beginning of the book claim his work as incisive, witty, insightful, joyful, moving, cynical, hopeful, wild, weird, exuding a life-changing and life affirming fire and zing, full of overarching sorrow, humorous and with a touch of the absurd, universal and yet utterly bizarre. Its all that and more... just like life.

Etgar's earlier book, Nimrod Flipout has received rave reviews and is now added to my ever-growing list of books to read! You can read the title story here. This review of another story from Nimrod Flipout rings true to me after reading The Girl on the Fridge.

Like most of Keret's work, "Fatso" will make you laugh, then wipe the smile off your face with its calculated manipulation of fear, desire and aggression, and its wistful paean to the insufficiency of human relationships.

Or in his own words, also from the same review:

"Some people write from the brain or the heart. I write from the kishkes," he says cheerfully in accented but flowing English. "Telling a story is the easiest thing. The moment there is an emotion I can name, I can give you 20 stories to choose from. I always start from a sensation, an image, never a plot. For some writers, the act of writing is like construction or engineering, building consciously. For me, it's the exact opposite. The best metaphor is surfing. You go to the ocean, wait for some wave to hit you, and try to keep your balance. You don't have GPS or a map. It's like exploding, and you can't explode slowly."

(kishkes = guts)

Speaking of savory quick bites, hear this episode of This American life, which featured 20 Acts in 60 Minutes; including Keret's work.

Update: Just found out via Keret's website, that the NYT reviewed The Girl on the Fridge earlier this year. And here's a conversation between Keret and another author, who now that I think of it has a similar writing style in reflecting on modern day life, George Saunders.

I have been strolling the internet and scrolling through a whole bunch of poetry and literature blogs tonight. Found a post with the poem Four Poems for Robin by Gary Snyder at one of them, from which I excerpt these lines that resonated with me!

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
----- karma demands.

Also these beautiful lines from a Mark Strand poem called The Remains; posted here.

Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

How powerful those 2 lines. How beautiful. Reminds me of something I read earlier:

"When language fails, poetry begins".

Go read the entire piece where that gem of a sentence appears. (A succinct hurrah for poetry, if there ever was one!) It is something Andrew Joran (never heard of him before this!) wrote in a piece called “The Emergency”, which....

..... originally appeared as a limited-circulation chapbook from Velocities press (2002) and was subsequently published in Andrew Joron’s collection of poetry, Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and in The Cry At Zero: Selected Prose (Counterpath Press, 2007).

I found it at the Poetry-Poetic site, which is going to have daily political poetry news - from September 15th till the elections on November 4th, 2008.