Gaurav Sagar > Recent Status Updates

Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ''I am Lazarus, come from the dead.
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'-
If one, setting a pillow bu her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.''

There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilising, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that flows through me.....

Alone I often fall into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended. I will seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience, and wear it under my dress like a talisman and then (I promise this) I will find some dingle in a wood where I can display my assortment of curious treasures. I promise myself this.

'........The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and the creepers.........'

'........The waves rise; their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship, which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and the creepers.........'

Yes, I think of Mamma. She will be crying. Why don't I ever write to her ? I can't tell why, can't understand it, and yet I can't decide to write. That's it: I don't want to tell anything. It's too silly. A pity, I shouldn't have parents who love me. I don't want to be desired at all. They will have to get used to not having a son any more.

Generally, we pupils do not like to laugh, that is to say, we are hardly able to any more. We lack the requisite jolliness and airiness. Am I wrong? God knows, sometimes my whole stay here seems like an incomprehensible dream.

What a poetic opening:

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

Every faraway steamer is a nearby sailing ship.
Every distant ship seen now is a ship from the past seen up close.
All the invisible sailors aboard ships on the horizon
Are visible sailors from the time of the old vessels,
From the slow, sail- driven age of perilous voyages,
From the wood and canvas age of voyages that took months.

The dewdrop
on a bamboo leaf
stays longer
than you, who vanish
at dawn.

How easily,
leaving my house,
he cuts through
the embroidered fabric
of the fallen leaves!

But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered.

The twisted rhombs ceased their clamour of
accompaniment;
The scorched laurel lay in the fire-dust;
The moon still declined to descend out of heaven,

But the black ominous owl hoot was audible.

And one raft bears our fates
on the veiled lake toward Avernus
Sail spread on Cerulean waters, I would shed tears
for two;
I shall live, if she continue in life,
If she dies, I shall go with her.

By an extraordinary feat of memory, Friedrich was soon able to retain the most complex games; and if his memory did fail him, he resorted to his sense of touch.

When we eat them for supper we are not allowed to speak because of the bones, and have to keep as quiet as fish ourselves. I never felt particularly comfortable about those meals, and the skewed fish-eyes often went on watching me even in my sleep.

That world, at once near and un-attainably far, said Ferber, exerted so powerful an attraction on him that he was afraid he might leap down into it, and might really have done so had not a man of about sixty suddenly appeared before him- like someone who's popped out of the bloody ground.

Looking at those gashes bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by a grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced- consciousness- and so perhaps extinguishers itself; we know very little about this.

As for myself, on those Sundays in the utterly deserted hotel I would regularly be overcome by such a sense of aimlessness and futility that I would go out, purely in order to preserve an illusion of purpose, and walk about amidst the city's immense and time-blackened nineteenth-century buildings, with no particular destination in mind.

He took almost the whole day to get dressed. Simply to fasten his cufflinks and his bow tie took him hours. And he was hardly finished dressing but it was time to undress again.

At any rate the more Uncle Adelwarth told his stories, the more desolate he became. After Christmas' 52 he fell into such a deep depression that, although he plainly felt a great need to talk about his life, he could no longer shape a single sentence, nor utter a single word or any sound at all.

-in the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of.

Living in those empty rooms had never struck her as a deprivation, though; rather, it had seemed, in a way not easy to describe, to be special favour or distinction conferred upon her by a happy turn of events.

But I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul.

Otherwise, as I have said, Dr. Selwyn was scarcely ever in the house. He lived in his hermitage, giving his entire attention, as he occasionally told me, to thoughts which on the one hand grew vaguer day by day, and, on the other, grew more precise and unambiguous.

"Yes, that's it. Action is now simply a kind of superfluity for me. It has jutted out of life, it has jutted out of my own will, and now it stands before me, like a separate, cold steel mechanism, waiting to be put in motion.

It was hard for me to explain to myself why I wanted to go to this length in relying, as it were, on the Superior's strength. Why should I want to borrow this strength of his? Why should I allow my final decision to depend on being expelled by the Superior? For, as I have already said, I had for a long time been aware of the Superior's essential powerlessness.

Was one obliged to pay back one's debts in the face of a world catastrophe ?

I want to get away from all my surroundings. From the smell of powerlessness that everyone round me gives off so strongly.

A type of cipher seemed to operate in my general experience of life. As in a corridor of mirrors, a single image is reflected again and again to endless depth. Things that I had seen in the past were clearly reflected on those that I encountered for the first time, and I felt that I was being led by such resemblances into the inner recesses of the corridor, into some fathomless inner chamber.