Thoughts in the Night

As you go upon the trail, the vistas become less and less familiar. You leave the cozy cottages and the inns behind, and go into the dark and bleak wilderness, and terrors await you, lurking and unknown. Some of your comrades fall, some prove treacherous, and others part ways, while you go along the road less travelled. A part of the heart longs to be back, on the rug, beside the fireplace, safe and warm, and another part says that the sword can never gain a true edge unless it endures the heat of the furnace.


Exhausted, you sleep as well as you can, on a bed as soft as you can make it, and wonder how far your journey will take you, and what you shall encounter further. You think in grief about all that has passed, and find a kind of catharsis in resolving to forget it all. The resolve does not hold long, however, and you drift off to sleep, looking long and hard at the shoulder and belt of the hunters in the sky. You wonder what beings could there be on those worlds, and what their joys and sorrows would be like. You ponder upon how little a speck in the immense world you represent, and how little it would mean if you suddenly vanished off the face of this world.

The oblivion, when it comes, is welcome, for thoughts can go on forever and always, and try to span the universe, which, unfortunately, cannot be spanned.

:)

Faust

I have not had the time or the patience to go through the entire of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by Kit Marlowe, but some parts of it are very soul-searching. Specially when Mephistopheles (spellings vary), himself a devil, tries to dissuade Faustus from striking a pact with Lucifer.

Faustus : Where are you damn'd?

Mephistopheles : In hell.

Faustus : How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

Mephistopheles : Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?

Do you yearn more for something you want to have, or something that you have lost?

The Tide Runneth Me Over

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;

"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;"

Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n,

Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav'n.

Sometimes, I think I would pay to have my memories wiped as well.  The movie [Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind] was a bit tedious though.    :)

Forever

from Good Omens by Neil Gaiman:

If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.

And if you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot… no, imagine a sneaker, laces trailing, kicking a pebble; imagine a stick, to poke at interesting things, and throw for a dog that may or may not decide to retrieve it; imagine a tuneless whistle, pounding some luckless popular tune into insensibility; imagine a figure, half angel, half devil, all human…

Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield…

…forever.

Farewell

It is 13th December, 2008. As shafts of sunlight stream through my east-facing window, I am clearing up my room, while Anand sits at my computer humming a tune about stars fading into the night. Half heartedly, I tell him to shut up, and get on with my packing.

It is 8th August, 2005. I sleep fitfully in my new room at BITS, with expectations and fears of what college might bring. Everything here seems strange, new, and weird in some way. Early into the morn, I wake up, and gaze at the luminous dial of my digital watch. It reads 5:01 A.M. I generally do not voluntarily wake up this early, but I cannot seem to go back to sleep. Thoughts keep rushing around like eddies in a whirlpool, and try as I might, I cannot stop thinking what this new microcosm willl mean to me .

14th December, 2008. I sleep with a heavy heart and the realization that this is probably my last day as a student at this campus, though I will be a student for the next six months, and an alumnus thereafter. I go over all the things that the last three and a half years have done to me in this place, and the result brings a wistful grin, and the realization that I have no regrets. I sleep peacefully. In a cliched world, I would wake up to the same numbers on the same watch, but I have packed it away ages earlier. As it happens, when I wake up, it is around 5 AM according to my mobile.

15th December, 2008. We say our goodbyes to friends and teachers, try to laugh it off, but with a kind of foreboding underneath. Talking in sombre tones deep into the night, we walk to our hostels. I leave my college at 6 AM in the morning, and say one last farewell to friends at the campus. 

It is 17th December 2008. I am back home, and a couple of relatives having dropped in helps to focus my thoughts somewhere else. When they are gone, I unpack, and memories come flooding back. When I put on the music, I am hard pressed to select a tune. Only for a while, though. Remembering, with a sigh and a smile, I play the song by Oasis on the soundtrack of The Butterfly Effect, and it makes a whole lot of sense.

Cause all of the stars,

Are fading away

Just try not to worry,

You'll see them some day.

Take what you need,

And be on your way,

And stop crying your heart out...

Mot juste, I'd say.

Thursday

"Are you the new recruit?" asked a heavy voice.

And in some strange way, though there was not the shadow of a shape in the gloom, Syme knew two things: first, that it came from a man of massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him.

"Are you the new recruit?" said the invisible chief, who seemed to have heard all about it. "All right. You are engaged."

Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this irrevocable phrase.

"I really have no experience," he began.

"No one has any experience," said the other, "of the Battle of
Armageddon."

"But I am really unfit--"

"You are willing, that is enough," said the unknown.

"Well, really," said Syme, "I don't know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test."

"I do," said the other -"martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day."

Recently, I read a book called The Man Who Was Thursday (A Nightmare). Written a hundred years ago by G.K. Chesterton, one of the best books I have ever had the fortune to read. In the book, Gabriel Syme, a poet turned detective works his way using an ingenious method, involving a gathering of poets and a matter of honour; into the central anarchist council; consisting of people known only by their names, and headed by a funny, yet terrible mastermind known as (what else?) Sunday.

What follows is a heady mixture of surrealism, philosophy and dark humour as the members of the anarchist council discover each other's true nature. The underlying theme of the whole novel, and indeed, Chesterton's purpose in writing it (according to a couple of reviews) is that righteousness is at the heart of a lot of evil in the world, and was intended to reaffirm the author's faith in the world, when he had suffered from depression for most of his life.

These sort of books generally lead me to introspection, and often self-doubt, but this was on a different scale altogether. What if the things we love and the dreams we chase in life are just dark shadows, and what if the world is not black and white but just a miasma of shifting, gray shapes? Already, as an astronomer of sorts, I sometimes feel painfully aware that our lives on this speck of a dust in the universe are entirely insignificant and unimportant, and the span of our lives does not even merit the blink of an eye in the cosmos, if such be there.

But if the reality we perceive may also be distorted, then it is a strange one indeed. Of course, the concrete must thrive, I suppose, but the riot of colours that we often surround ourselves with, on reflection, appears to be a subconscious effort to escape the gray.

(Well, I suppose I have rambled on long enough.)

Morning Glory

From the sleeve notes of an old Oasis album, one of the best pieces of writing I've ever seen. End.

"Coming down off the nova somewhere near the boiled egg that is the Royal Albert Hall, we watch Paul's sun crossed with John's star and hold ice cream hands. Someone slipped on a cassette as the one you wanted left with someone else but somehow it was cool because as the music filled the shadows, you heard a sound that was a million miles away from fakery and a step away from your heart.

Just like it always did, this sound puts the swagger back into your step, the rush into your blood but somehow, and I don't know how, they had become deeper, wider, soulful, better at their craft, inspired by so many things like a world that is tilting who knows where and the applause they always knew was theirs but waited so impatiently to receive. Words cut you from all angles, back up by a monumental sound that rises high, high and high to crash against your rocks and then changes, majestically and magically to soothe the wounds inside. As you are dragged inside on this trip abandon, you hear a council estate singing its heart out, you hear the clink of loose change that is never enough to buy what you need, boredom and poverty, hours spent with a burnt out guitar, dirty pubs and cracked up pavements, violence and love, all rolled into one, and now all this.

At the end you flip over and start again because now you are not isolated. They have gone to work so that you can go home. High above the day turns pink and you feel your feet lift above the ground as new roads open up in front of you. In this town the jury is always rigged but the people know. They always know the truth. Believe. Belief. Beyond. Their morning glory."