Quotes Of The Day

“In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.”

― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

"The mass media first convinced us that the imaginary was real, and now they are convincing us that the real is imaginary; and the more reality the TV screen shows us, the more cinematic our everyday world becomes. Until as certain philosophers have insisted, we will think that we are alone in the world, and everything else is the film that God or some evil spirit is projecting before our eyes."

― Umberto Eco,  How to React to Familiar Faces

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”

― Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies

Samuel Beckett - Endgame (Summary)

This has been probably the most eccentric and illogical play that I have ever read. I mean where to start with this. The settings, the characters, the story line everything is so unconventional, I wonder what really was going on in the writer's head. I am not privy to it and I don't claim to deduce any intelligent undertones from it all.

In a sparse setting in a room with couple of windows, this one act play has four characters that all live in this room. Hamm is blind and on a wheelchair. Clov his servant is his only eyes and help and who can not sit. Hagg and Nell as Hamm's parents and they have no legs and they live in the dustbins in the room itself. The drama drags itself over obsessively hopeless situations and dialogues. As with Beckett's any other work, repetition is the key aspect. Hamm and Clov increasingly engage in a despairing banter that is difficult to make sense of. Outside the room, through the windows the scene is of desolateness, the reason to which are unknown. Nature has abandoned them and all and the only view outside would be of uncompromising invariability.  Though there is an passage of time as in day and night, but in the large scheme of things, time is meaningless. We are not told of their ages or of the times in which they lived. Any attempt to make meaning (of life) is doomed to fail. There is no wholesome life or living, any grandstanding or intellectual discourses on how to live it. Instead what we have are small absurd moments, repetitive actions, banal talk, overhanging gloom and an eventual death. Life has been broken into inconsequential moments that are to be lived and lived in doing that amounts to nothing more. The absurdity of these moments (and life itself) is not in living it, but in trying to make a sense or any sense of it.

Hamm: Clov! 
Clov: [impatiently] What is it? 
Hamm: We're not beginning to ... to ... mean something? 
Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh.] Ah that's a good one! 
Hamm: I wonder. [Pause.]” 

In making it absolute of time, the writer has negated a possibility of linear progress, of betterment. Instead, the continual repetition of banal acts reinforces that the only end if of nothingness. Even the idea of change, of meaning, of nature is frowned upon, because something like this has previously happened and it will happen again with the same outcome. But beyond death, what is that outcome is not certain. Death is an inevitable conclusion to this charade of an existence, but isn't it for all existences. In showing the torment is eternal and cyclical where each day unfolds the same farce of 'living' till eternity, and nothing ever changes in this slow march to nothingness, the writer turns inside out that small room into the bigger canvas of our lives where the self is trapped similarly (in a small room) trying to live those moments, grappling and trying everything in the hope that something sticks before the coming Endgame.

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.” 

Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha [Selected Sections - I]

Siddhartha had started to nurse discontent in himself, he had started to feel that the love of his father and the love of his mother, and also the love of his friend, Govinda, would not bring him joy for ever and ever, would not nurse him, feed him, satisfy him. He had started to suspect that his venerable father and his other teachers, that the wise Brahmans had already revealed to him the most and best of their wisdom, that they had already filled his expecting vessel with their richness, and the vessel was not full, the spirit was not content, the soul was not calm, the heart was not satisfied. The ablutions were good, but they were water, they did not wash off the sin, they did not heal the spirit’s thirst, they did not relieve the fear in his heart. The sacrifices and the invocation of the gods were excellent— but was that all? Did the sacrifices give a happy fortune? And what about the gods? Was it really Prajapati who had created the world? Was it not the Atman, He, the only one, the singular one? Were the gods not creations, created like me and you, subject to time, mortal? Was it therefore good, was it right, was it meaningful and the highest occupation to make offerings to the gods? For whom else were offerings to be made, who else was to be worshiped but Him, the only one, the Atman? And where was Atman to be found, where did He reside, where did his eternal heart beat, where else but in one’s own self, in its innermost part, in its indestructible part, which everyone had in himself? But where, where was this self, this innermost part, this ultimate part? It was not flesh and bone, it was neither thought nor consciousness, thus the wisest ones taught. So, where, where was it? To reach this place, the self, myself, the Atman, there was another way, which was worthwhile looking for? Alas, and nobody showed this way, nobody knew it, not the father, and not the teachers and wise men, not the holy sacrificial songs!They knew everything, the Brahman and their holy books, they knew everything, they had taken care of everything and of more than everything, the creation of the world, the origin of speech, of food, of inhaling, of exhaling, the arrangement of the senses, the acts of the gods, they knew infinitely much—but was it valuable to know all of this, not knowing that one and only thing, the most important thing, the solely important thing?
 
Surely, many verses of the holy books, particularly in the Upanishads of Sama veda, spoke of this innermost and ultimate thing, wonderful verses.“Your soul is the whole world,” was written there, and it was written that man in his sleep, in his deep sleep, would meet with his innermost part and would reside in the Atman. Marvelous wisdom was in these verses, all knowledge of the wisest ones had been collected here in magic words, pure as honey collected by bees. No, not to be looked down upon was the tremendous amount of enlightenment which lay here collected and preserved by innumerable generations of wise Brahman.—But where were the Brahman, where the priests, where the wise men or penitents, who had succeeded in not just knowing this deepest of all knowledge but also to live it? Where was the knowledgeable one who wove his spell to bring his familiarity with the Atman out of the sleep into the state of being awake, into the life, into every step of the way, into word and deed? Siddhartha knew many venerable Brahmans, chiefly his father, the pure one, the scholar, the most venerable one. His father was to be admired, quiet and noble were his manners, pure his life, wise his words, delicate and noble thoughts lived behind its brow —but even he, who knew so much, did he live in blissfulness, did he have peace, was he not also just a searching man, a thirsty man? Did he not, again and again, have to drink from holy sources, as a thirsty man, from the offerings, from the books, from the disputes of the Brahman? Why did he, the irreproachable one, have to wash off sins every day, strive for a cleansing every day, over and over every day? Was not Atman in him, did not the pristine source spring from his heart? It had o be found, the pristine source in one’s own self, it had to be possessed! Everything else was searching, was a detour, was getting lost.

[.....] 

Om is the bow, the arrow is soul, The Brahman is the arrow's target, That one should incessantly hit.

[.....]

A goal stood before Siddhartha, a single goal: to become empty, empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, to find tranquility with an emptied heard, to be open to miracles in unselfish thoughts, that was his goal. Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self, the great secret.
 
Instructed by the oldest of the Samanas Siddhartha practiced self-denial, practiced meditation, according to a new Samana rules. A heron flew over the bamboo forest—and Siddhartha accepted the heron into his soul, flew over forest and mountains, was a heron, ate fish, felt the pangs of a heron’s hunger, spoke the heron’s croak, died a heron’s death. A dead jackal was lying on the sandy bank, and Siddhartha’s soul slipped inside the body, was the dead jackal, lay on the banks, got bloated, stank, decayed, as dismembered by hyenas, was skinned by vultures, turned into a skeleton, turned to dust, was blown across the fields. And Siddhartha’s soul returned, had died, had decayed, was scattered as dust, had tasted the gloomy intoxication of the cycle, awaited in new thirst like a hunter in the gap, where he could escape from the cycle, where the end of the causes, where an eternity without suffering began. He killed his senses, he killed his memory, he slipped out of his self into thousands of other forms, was an animal, was carrion, was stone, was wood, was water, and awoke every time to find his old self again, sun shone or moon, was his self again, turned round in the cycle, felt thirst, overcame the thirst, felt new thirst.
 
Siddhartha learned a lot when he was with the Samanas, many ways leading away from the self he learned to go. He went the way of self-denial by means of pain, through voluntarily suffering and overcoming pain, hunger, thirst, tiredness. He went the way of self-denial by means of meditation, through imagining the mind to be void of all conceptions. These and other ways he learned to go, a thousand times he left his self, for hours and days he remained in the non-self. But though the ways led away from the self, their end nevertheless always led back to the self. Though Siddhartha fled from the self a thousand times, stayed in nothingness, stayed in the animal, in the stone, the return was inevitable, inescapable was the hour, when he found himself back in the sunshine or in the moonlight, in the shade or in the rain, and was once again his self and Siddhartha, and again felt the agony of the cycle which had been forced upon him.

And Siddhartha said quietly, as if he was talking to himself: "What is meditation? What is leaving one's body? What is fasting? What is holding one's breath? It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of
being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox−cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice−wine or fermented coconut−milk. Then he won't feel his self any more, then he won't feel the pains of life any more, then he finds a short numbing of the senses. When he falls asleep over his bowl of rice−wine, he'll find the same what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape their bodies through long exercises, staying in the non−self. This is how it is, oh Govinda."

[.....] 

Quoth Siddhartha : "It took me a long time and am not finished learning this yet, oh Govinda, that there is nothing to be learned! There is indeed no such thing, so I believe, as what we refer to as ‘learning.’ There is, oh my friend, just one knowledge, this is everywhere, this is Atman, this is within me and within you and within every creature. And so I’m starting to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the desire to know it, than learning."