Chandan > Books: Read‎ (104)

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to that of excess stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.

This antimony rested on the assumption that I myself from the outset was devoid of the flesh, of reality, of action. It was true, indeed, that the flesh came late to me at the beginning, but I was waiting for it with words.

It follows that he who dabbles in words can create tragedy, but cannot participate in it.

A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in a romantically noble death. Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate.

But body and spirit had never blended. They had never come to resemble each other. Never had I discovered in physical action anything resembling the chilling, terrifying satisfaction afforded by intellectual adventure. Nor had I ever experienced in intellectual adventure the selfless heat, the hot darkness of physical action.

I had perceived dimply, too, that the only physical proof of the existence of consciousness was suffering.

The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero;

The group was concerned with all those things that could never emerge from words - sweat, and tears, and cries of joy or pain. If one probed deeper still, it was concerned with the blood that words could never cause to flow. The reason perhaps why the testaments of the doomed are oddly remote from individual expression, impressing one rather with their stereotyped quality, is that they are the words of the flesh.

For shared suffering, more than anything else, is the ultimate opponent of verbal expression.

...I had a vision where something that, if I were alone, would have resolved back into muscles and words, was held fast by the power of the group and led me away to a far land, whence there would be no return. It was, perhaps, the beginning of my placing reliance on others, a reliance that was mutual; and each of us, by committing himself to this immeasurable power, belonged to the whole.

If the solemnity and dignity of the body arise solely from the element of mortality that lurks within it, then the road that leads to death, I reasoned, must have some private path connecting with pain, suffering, and the continuing consciousness that is proof of life.

Two different voices constantly call to us. One comes from within, the other from without. The one from without is one's daily duty. If the part of the mind that responded to duty corresponded exactly with the voice from within, then one would indeed be supremely happy.