In the heady days of my curmudgeonly adolescence, most things that I thought were in control have, however, started moving away uncontrollably from me. Some of the other things have also slipped away as I had no stamina left in me to take into account the things that started getting away from me one by one.
Sure it was agonizing to bear something like that happening, but thank heavens, one fine day, like a lightbulb moment, it occurred to me that while at school I had first read W.H. Auden’s poem ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ and shared it in a letter to the girl at school. And ever since that light bulb moment, my life got slightly onto a better track.
While others borrowed Resnick and Halliday’s Fundamentals of Physics or a VB Rastogi on Biology, I lugged a leather-bound John Keats book of poems in my hand or got issued from the school library a Rabindranath Tagore for his oeuvre in nature poetry or even Leo Tolstoy’s huge tome Anna Karenina.
Poems Shaped Me First, Stories Much Later
Several re-readings of Tagore’s evocatively beautiful book of poems ‘Gitanjali,’ including poems like ‘Flower Maiden’ (Phul Bala), ‘The Broken Heart’ (Bhagna Hriday), ‘Gitabitan’ and ‘Basundhara,’ Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper,’ Tennyson’s elegiac beauties like ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Ulysses,’ John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ PB Shelly’s ‘To a Skylark’ or Robert Frost poems from the 1960s/70s’ Indian anthology of poems ’Birds of Paradise’ gave me some of the most intimate moments of joy and wonder. I too longed, like Tagore, for a spiritual companionship with Nature and its impeccable serenity. Back in the day, I used to copiously read poems after poems from the poetry books I borrowed from my school library. Thank God for the poetry books our school library was well-stocked with. Consolatory poems shaped my conscience first; stories in the form of most-read novels pricked my interest levels much later in life.
The serendipitous discovery of those heart-touching poems I read when I was a school-goer and their profound meaning had made a quiet difference to my sense of living and longing even as I yearned for the quality of laidback life; the one which is not entirely imposed upon my share of kismet or destiny but something rooted in the persuasive aspects of Mother Nature providing just enough edible food, clean water, untainted oxygen, and habitable shelter, and loads of inspiration from Nature that rejoices in the ideals of ‘Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram’ (‘Truth, Piety and Beauty’) cherishing the harmonious relationship between Man and Nature. Back in the day, one of the stanzas of the W.H. Auden poem that I had used for my love to bloom goes like this:
“In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.”
And the next stanza…
“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.”
I have never looked back since the day of my first reading of the poem or so my optimist self feels. The pessimist feeling that hovers inside me, however, begs to feel otherwise... That old narrative of an earlier life is best left unsaid … because something breaks inside and a numbness torment ensues whenever I am brooding or carping over the little things that have irretrievably fallen on the wayside of my teenage years long gone into the obscurity of time. Decades have passed, I am a grown-up now; not a pre-adolescent dreamy youngster any longer. (Goodness! Those were the best days of my life, I tell you). Yet, the undeniable right to be pulled in into the past days that I have left far behind and come away forever since rests with me, nobody perchance is going to take it away from me, I know; it feels as if it’s been a kind of an umbilical string of connection to my past that never severs. It’s kind of hard to say that, but it’s harder still to find anyone (from my school days) remembering anything of those fond days of our senior high school years. I have no way of knowing. It hurts really deep that you guys don’t care to remember much of those days, do you? I have resolved that though I never had any contact with any of you poor souls to figure out who among you might – after all that prickly sense of friendship we’ve had – have a sense of nostalgia just as strongly as I have always had. But again, this time to let me on to the truth of the long-closed chapter of my life, I’d be careful to seek zero fair-weather friends popping in and out of my life like poxes. Times change, and with that dehumanizing reality so does everything else. It seems as though you guys have changed beyond all recognition and basic human feeling of fraternity bonding. Is that what it is? I ask you.
Talking of growing up, a job was necessarily a burden on the kind of the adolescent’s sense of freedom and independence (to procrastinate on everything was paramount) I have had cherished all throughout my childhood years. Nobody was allowed to trespass uninvited into my world of ample living and studying (academically), not even a promise of a career or a job could entice me into sniffing up something that smacked of "shouldering one’s share of responsibilities" stink and “pay-up-your-bills” ploys. Likewise, I kept that specific get-a-job-first sentiment far aside from the comfortable world of my whole-hearted pursuit of the love of which I call “normal academics” and my deep passion for reading books and reflective nostalgic writing. Never was I keen to even chance upon something new apart from something I already knew. I was playing it safe, but it had to change someday. If Life throws the hardball of challenges at you, you got to catch it in one way or the other. It’ll hit painfully enough if you are not up to the job of catching it. Call life a hard ball of challenges, then you better know it is.
Life Has Gone On
Zindagi aage nikal gayi…
All of a sudden things began to glow a little differently than I was not normally accustomed to seeing, feeling, or realizing. That is how life is I guess: sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, often leaving a bitter aftertaste for you to deal with.
I think it was some kind of trap being set that I did not foresee coming; a seemingly smallest of cracks and I fell through it ping-ponging all the way down in the dumps. I didn’t realize, didn’t even get to smell the proverbial stinking rat, instead I ended up opening a dreary world around me and slowly started acknowledging little by little my new unsought scare-mongering destiny, but by then a façade of options seemed to display more than one ploy to select from.
It was no doubt a chimerical gambit that enticed me into an abject submission of Life’s simulacrum of reality – with its choicest of ploys (and nothing else) for me to pick from. No, doing medicine was no longer on the list and I could surmise as much that it won’t be there anymore. Engineering, that mischievous sprite was looming large over everything that I was prepared not to do.
Afterward, I simply caved in into the customary pro forma of life. I had to, for there was no other go. Because there was no way out of this loutish conundrum-humdrum situation that I was finding myself in tied to the tethers of the abject confusing realities the so-called modern life has on offer for me, I gave up to its fiendish maneuverings. I, therefore, succumbed to the fashionably filthy lucre of being a computer literate earning two-day holidays in a week that has had me plonked down into great, never-before-seen working conditions and high-tech surroundings that is at once futuristically niche with interiors done in custom-finished glass partitions. Do these thought processes come about when one has a congenital defect or suffers from some kind of mild depression? That’s the way of life’s basic paperwork I suppose. You cannot possibly take me for a guilty party if you are still finding me struggling to adhere to its unilaterally imposed diktats because I can clearly see you too are floundering trying to mind its unwritten decree.
No one is perfect, chum, much less you and me, and we are all in this together. The world is continuing on as it always did and we are, whether we like it or not, in its constant movement, meaning, and adventure. Obviously, that sounds like an existential crisis to me, and believe me, things like these keep on coming to test your resolve, your agency, in ways that you cannot quite believe. Yes, I know: WTF? For now, I feel compelled to say that life has gone on long enough to worry about its inherent machinations if you will. Such is life and life is such. So take note: Focus on your health and screw everything else that’s not worth your time and dime. Let this little resolve wash over your conscience like a warm breeze and make you feel at home with this point of view. So pick yourself up, dust yourself off and move on. That’s the spirit.
Make no mistake, Life is still an enduring classic that stands on its own merit, meaning it is sometimes a tightly-packed whodunit thriller, sometimes a grand historical sweep of a narrative, sometimes a long poem, and sometimes the story ends abruptly; each has its own pleasures. Live life to the fullest while it is still possible to do so.
Still with me on this one? Good. Blaming one’s life has become, for many of us, including me of course, the guilty-party major, a good old-fashioned existential angst that never lets go of its tentacle-like hold over you. Whether or not I blame my own way of life for some of the impediments I have had to face early on depends exactly on how I want to write about it and how you want to hear it out from me. Besides, I always save the best for last. And that’s why I don’t want to live a life that’s burdened with recollecting a minefield of regrets from the past and impair my present. I’ve now resolved that I’ll stop philosophizing my past because experience has taught me that regrets whether big or small certainly has the power to devour you whole from the inside out. Regrets are a mean business like sorrows, but sometimes sorrows are sweeter than regrets. We all do things we regret. But regrets can run you down and potentially dent your present flow of life if you have the habit of constantly scratching your head thinking about them; they get you nowhere. We are all fragile: That’s exactly what I have learned from the experience of living my life as it comes. So, I better divest myself of the regrets on the wayside of life while I ably move on with whatever little courage and good sense I had been bequeathed.
Life goes on… the ball of Earth rotates, shining at dawn and darkening at night… with or without you or me in its rotary of daily sunsets and dawns. Remember somebody had said, “Who will cry when you die?” Nobody is going to cry when you die. It’s pathetic that nobody remembers the one who is no more beyond a few days or at the most a month; beyond that time period it becomes, I think, too difficult to suffer as we gradually become too obstinately shamefaced in saying, "Life goes on...!" Yes, we might shed bitter tears of guilt no doubt, but somehow also feel able to move on with our terrible surviving selves dealing with office politics, email bombs, traffic headaches, not to mention our insatiable appetite for putting out smug messages of loathing and self-loathing on umpteen social media platforms. Life finds a way to live as it pleases.
****
Life goes on miraculously, for it has no reason to stop and neither should you. Stopping won’t help. At best, as long as we live (with little humility and dignity values are thrown in), we can make reclamations of life for all its beauty and pain. Sounds preachy? Maybe; but it’s the truth.
That's the best conclusion I can draw at the moment. And you wouldn’t have kept reading this far if you hadn’t too, I think. Now, let’s get home safe and sound. Happy dreaming.
By Arindam Moulick
Postscript: The above essay is the fifth sequel (part 6) to the main essay titled "That Good Old-Fashioned Existential Angst" published in November 2018 on my blog site Pebbles on the Beach. More on this 'dream' theme in my next blog.
Sure it was agonizing to bear something like that happening, but thank heavens, one fine day, like a lightbulb moment, it occurred to me that while at school I had first read W.H. Auden’s poem ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ and shared it in a letter to the girl at school. And ever since that light bulb moment, my life got slightly onto a better track.
While others borrowed Resnick and Halliday’s Fundamentals of Physics or a VB Rastogi on Biology, I lugged a leather-bound John Keats book of poems in my hand or got issued from the school library a Rabindranath Tagore for his oeuvre in nature poetry or even Leo Tolstoy’s huge tome Anna Karenina.
Poems Shaped Me First, Stories Much Later
Several re-readings of Tagore’s evocatively beautiful book of poems ‘Gitanjali,’ including poems like ‘Flower Maiden’ (Phul Bala), ‘The Broken Heart’ (Bhagna Hriday), ‘Gitabitan’ and ‘Basundhara,’ Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper,’ Tennyson’s elegiac beauties like ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Ulysses,’ John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ PB Shelly’s ‘To a Skylark’ or Robert Frost poems from the 1960s/70s’ Indian anthology of poems ’Birds of Paradise’ gave me some of the most intimate moments of joy and wonder. I too longed, like Tagore, for a spiritual companionship with Nature and its impeccable serenity. Back in the day, I used to copiously read poems after poems from the poetry books I borrowed from my school library. Thank God for the poetry books our school library was well-stocked with. Consolatory poems shaped my conscience first; stories in the form of most-read novels pricked my interest levels much later in life.
The serendipitous discovery of those heart-touching poems I read when I was a school-goer and their profound meaning had made a quiet difference to my sense of living and longing even as I yearned for the quality of laidback life; the one which is not entirely imposed upon my share of kismet or destiny but something rooted in the persuasive aspects of Mother Nature providing just enough edible food, clean water, untainted oxygen, and habitable shelter, and loads of inspiration from Nature that rejoices in the ideals of ‘Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram’ (‘Truth, Piety and Beauty’) cherishing the harmonious relationship between Man and Nature. Back in the day, one of the stanzas of the W.H. Auden poem that I had used for my love to bloom goes like this:
“In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.”
And the next stanza…
“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.”
I have never looked back since the day of my first reading of the poem or so my optimist self feels. The pessimist feeling that hovers inside me, however, begs to feel otherwise... That old narrative of an earlier life is best left unsaid … because something breaks inside and a numbness torment ensues whenever I am brooding or carping over the little things that have irretrievably fallen on the wayside of my teenage years long gone into the obscurity of time. Decades have passed, I am a grown-up now; not a pre-adolescent dreamy youngster any longer. (Goodness! Those were the best days of my life, I tell you). Yet, the undeniable right to be pulled in into the past days that I have left far behind and come away forever since rests with me, nobody perchance is going to take it away from me, I know; it feels as if it’s been a kind of an umbilical string of connection to my past that never severs. It’s kind of hard to say that, but it’s harder still to find anyone (from my school days) remembering anything of those fond days of our senior high school years. I have no way of knowing. It hurts really deep that you guys don’t care to remember much of those days, do you? I have resolved that though I never had any contact with any of you poor souls to figure out who among you might – after all that prickly sense of friendship we’ve had – have a sense of nostalgia just as strongly as I have always had. But again, this time to let me on to the truth of the long-closed chapter of my life, I’d be careful to seek zero fair-weather friends popping in and out of my life like poxes. Times change, and with that dehumanizing reality so does everything else. It seems as though you guys have changed beyond all recognition and basic human feeling of fraternity bonding. Is that what it is? I ask you.
Talking of growing up, a job was necessarily a burden on the kind of the adolescent’s sense of freedom and independence (to procrastinate on everything was paramount) I have had cherished all throughout my childhood years. Nobody was allowed to trespass uninvited into my world of ample living and studying (academically), not even a promise of a career or a job could entice me into sniffing up something that smacked of "shouldering one’s share of responsibilities" stink and “pay-up-your-bills” ploys. Likewise, I kept that specific get-a-job-first sentiment far aside from the comfortable world of my whole-hearted pursuit of the love of which I call “normal academics” and my deep passion for reading books and reflective nostalgic writing. Never was I keen to even chance upon something new apart from something I already knew. I was playing it safe, but it had to change someday. If Life throws the hardball of challenges at you, you got to catch it in one way or the other. It’ll hit painfully enough if you are not up to the job of catching it. Call life a hard ball of challenges, then you better know it is.
Life Has Gone On
Zindagi aage nikal gayi…
All of a sudden things began to glow a little differently than I was not normally accustomed to seeing, feeling, or realizing. That is how life is I guess: sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, often leaving a bitter aftertaste for you to deal with.
I think it was some kind of trap being set that I did not foresee coming; a seemingly smallest of cracks and I fell through it ping-ponging all the way down in the dumps. I didn’t realize, didn’t even get to smell the proverbial stinking rat, instead I ended up opening a dreary world around me and slowly started acknowledging little by little my new unsought scare-mongering destiny, but by then a façade of options seemed to display more than one ploy to select from.
It was no doubt a chimerical gambit that enticed me into an abject submission of Life’s simulacrum of reality – with its choicest of ploys (and nothing else) for me to pick from. No, doing medicine was no longer on the list and I could surmise as much that it won’t be there anymore. Engineering, that mischievous sprite was looming large over everything that I was prepared not to do.
Afterward, I simply caved in into the customary pro forma of life. I had to, for there was no other go. Because there was no way out of this loutish conundrum-humdrum situation that I was finding myself in tied to the tethers of the abject confusing realities the so-called modern life has on offer for me, I gave up to its fiendish maneuverings. I, therefore, succumbed to the fashionably filthy lucre of being a computer literate earning two-day holidays in a week that has had me plonked down into great, never-before-seen working conditions and high-tech surroundings that is at once futuristically niche with interiors done in custom-finished glass partitions. Do these thought processes come about when one has a congenital defect or suffers from some kind of mild depression? That’s the way of life’s basic paperwork I suppose. You cannot possibly take me for a guilty party if you are still finding me struggling to adhere to its unilaterally imposed diktats because I can clearly see you too are floundering trying to mind its unwritten decree.
No one is perfect, chum, much less you and me, and we are all in this together. The world is continuing on as it always did and we are, whether we like it or not, in its constant movement, meaning, and adventure. Obviously, that sounds like an existential crisis to me, and believe me, things like these keep on coming to test your resolve, your agency, in ways that you cannot quite believe. Yes, I know: WTF? For now, I feel compelled to say that life has gone on long enough to worry about its inherent machinations if you will. Such is life and life is such. So take note: Focus on your health and screw everything else that’s not worth your time and dime. Let this little resolve wash over your conscience like a warm breeze and make you feel at home with this point of view. So pick yourself up, dust yourself off and move on. That’s the spirit.
Make no mistake, Life is still an enduring classic that stands on its own merit, meaning it is sometimes a tightly-packed whodunit thriller, sometimes a grand historical sweep of a narrative, sometimes a long poem, and sometimes the story ends abruptly; each has its own pleasures. Live life to the fullest while it is still possible to do so.
Still with me on this one? Good. Blaming one’s life has become, for many of us, including me of course, the guilty-party major, a good old-fashioned existential angst that never lets go of its tentacle-like hold over you. Whether or not I blame my own way of life for some of the impediments I have had to face early on depends exactly on how I want to write about it and how you want to hear it out from me. Besides, I always save the best for last. And that’s why I don’t want to live a life that’s burdened with recollecting a minefield of regrets from the past and impair my present. I’ve now resolved that I’ll stop philosophizing my past because experience has taught me that regrets whether big or small certainly has the power to devour you whole from the inside out. Regrets are a mean business like sorrows, but sometimes sorrows are sweeter than regrets. We all do things we regret. But regrets can run you down and potentially dent your present flow of life if you have the habit of constantly scratching your head thinking about them; they get you nowhere. We are all fragile: That’s exactly what I have learned from the experience of living my life as it comes. So, I better divest myself of the regrets on the wayside of life while I ably move on with whatever little courage and good sense I had been bequeathed.
Life goes on… the ball of Earth rotates, shining at dawn and darkening at night… with or without you or me in its rotary of daily sunsets and dawns. Remember somebody had said, “Who will cry when you die?” Nobody is going to cry when you die. It’s pathetic that nobody remembers the one who is no more beyond a few days or at the most a month; beyond that time period it becomes, I think, too difficult to suffer as we gradually become too obstinately shamefaced in saying, "Life goes on...!" Yes, we might shed bitter tears of guilt no doubt, but somehow also feel able to move on with our terrible surviving selves dealing with office politics, email bombs, traffic headaches, not to mention our insatiable appetite for putting out smug messages of loathing and self-loathing on umpteen social media platforms. Life finds a way to live as it pleases.
****
Life goes on miraculously, for it has no reason to stop and neither should you. Stopping won’t help. At best, as long as we live (with little humility and dignity values are thrown in), we can make reclamations of life for all its beauty and pain. Sounds preachy? Maybe; but it’s the truth.
That's the best conclusion I can draw at the moment. And you wouldn’t have kept reading this far if you hadn’t too, I think. Now, let’s get home safe and sound. Happy dreaming.
By Arindam Moulick
Postscript: The above essay is the fifth sequel (part 6) to the main essay titled "That Good Old-Fashioned Existential Angst" published in November 2018 on my blog site Pebbles on the Beach. More on this 'dream' theme in my next blog.
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