Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Writing is much as love is: it binds you to your inner truth by connecting you to the outside world.

Writing is as your sweet heart is who would be loved without being understood. Only mediocre writing is totally understandable.

Consistency is a mediocre virtue and does not measure up to the astounding paradoxes of nature.It is a virtue in a moralist but a vice in a genius. There is no such thing as a consistent genius just as there is no such thing as an inconsistent moralist. Great writing is as God is in the act of his Creation: it always contradicts itself, and in doing so it looks at all the contradictions of life and reality.

Across the thin, vaporous boundaries of language sits Truth - inviting, tempting but always receding as your mind advances. And it denies you access not because it means you to know it the less but because it wants you to enjoy it the more.

A writer and his reader are in a secret pact always to enjoy the vague intimations of Truth, but never to reveal or know Truth itself.

A writer is nothing if not God and, like God, must always remain knowable but indefinable, palpable but not expressible. Like the God-experience, the experience of writing -- and reading --- must be for ever enjoyable and for ever unknowable; forever knowable and for ever untranslatable. A writer and his reader are in a secret pact always to enjoy the vague intimations of Truth, but never Truth itself. A writer's words end up saying less than he means to convey and a reader reads more than the meaning unexpressed. And yet, across the thin, vaporous boundaries of language sits Truth, inviting, tempting but always receding as your mind advances towards it. And it denies access not because it means you to know it the less but because it wants you enjoy it the more. If Truth stood where it first appeared, the horizons of your mind would never widen, nor your experience of joy touch the limitless.
Never belittle anything by trying to know it fully, to describe its whole truth. Everything in this universe is a God unto itself and will not yield to you the the core of its secrets. Its under no obligation to feed your petty curiosity. In that sense alone, God resides in every atom and every atom in the universe is a universe by itself, every little soul at once a part of the whole and the whole itself. The moment you focus on any single atom, it slips away and looks askance at you, reflecting the vast universe.
Writing -- like reading -- is much as love is: it binds you to your inner truth by connecting you to the outside world. Writing --like reading -- is as your sweet heart is: she would be loved without being understood. Only mediocre writing is totally understandable from only one angle. And by only one generation. Each new generation rediscovers the classics of the generations gone by. Great writing lends itself to new meanings for new generations. And thus every generation finds something entirely new in an old classic. This is how classics attain immortality.

Great writing is as spring is: it renews itself every year, bringing newer flowers of newer shades . Truth is always fresh; and it always refreshes those who receive it.
Great writing is as God is: it always contradicts itself, and in doing so it looks at all the contradictions of life and reality. Consistency is a mediocre virtue and does not measure up to the astounding paradoxes of nature. It is a virtue in a moralist but a vice in a genius. There is no such thing as a consistent genius just as they is no such thing as an inconsistent moralist. Consistency comes in handy where goals are narrow and targets low. But a genius rises to dizzy, unseeable heights as much as he plummets to shocking depths. His inconsistencies are inexplicable as the contradictions of God and nature are. A great writer has no use for pedestrian virtues like consistency for he has to traverse vast zones full of extreme opposites, travelling through continents of scorching summers and freezings colds.

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