What will I be if I didn't waste my time?

The doodling and time-wasting that I do now is not anything new; it is a continuation of how I was in graduate school, which itself was no different from my undergraduate days.  Of course, the four years of time-wasting in Coimbatore seemed like I had perfected the art of wasting time all through my growing up years in Neyveli.

Wasting time is all I have been doing all these years.  What a joyful life it has been!

Today, I doodled away making this:

Well, ok, I "wasted"--and continue to waste--time by reading anything that interested me, whether or not I really understood them!  In my graduate school years, I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I came across magazines that I never even knew existed.  From the New Yorker, the Economist, and the Atlantic, which I later started subscribing to, to a whole bunch of others that were my library staples, of which Public Interest,  Dissent  and Commentary were my special favorites.  I think I had built up within me images of old-time  intellectuals gathering at cafes and universities in New York and wished that I were there.  Especially the 1930s and 1940s environment that Irving Kristol experienced at the City University of New York:

 The center of the lunchroom, taking up most of the space, consisted of chest-high, wooden tables under a low, artificial ceiling. There, most of the students ate their lunches, standing up. (I looked upon this as being reasonable, since at Boys' High, in Brooklyn, we had had the same arrangement. To this day I find it as natural to eat a sandwich standing up as sitting down.) Around this central area there was a fairly wide and high-ceilinged aisle; and bordering the aisle, under large windows with small panes of glass that kept out as much light as they let in, were the alcoves-semicircular (or were they rectangular?), each with a bench fitted along the wall and a low, long refectory table in the middle. The first alcove on the right, as you entered the lunchroom, was Alcove No.1, and this soon became most of what City College meant to me. It was there one ate lunch, played Ping-Pong (sometimes with a net, sometimes without, passed the time of day between and after classes, argued incessantly, and generally devoted oneself to solving the ultimate problems of the human race. The penultimate problems we figured could be left for our declining years, after we had graduated.

Now, it is a different world--not only at CUNY, but everywhere.  And I, for one, don't even have to head to the library to read magazines.  From the comfort of my home, I read this essay in Commentary and thanked my years of doodling away in the libraries at USC!  Joseph Epstein, who is now 78, writes about how the parent-child relationship has changed over the decades:

My father and I did not hug, we did not kiss, we did not say “I love you” to each other. This may seem strangely distant, even cold to a generation of huggers, sharers, and deep-dish carers. No deprivation was entailed here, please believe me. We didn’t have to do any of these things, my father and I. The fact was, I loved my father, and I knew he loved me.

I can relate to that.  It is almost like he is describing my childhood.

Epstein makes a good point when he writes about why things have changed from that old-school:

I have a suspicion that this cultural change began with the entrée into the language of the word parenting. I don’t know the exact year that the word parenting came into vogue, but my guess is that it arrived around the same time as the new full-court press, boots-on-the-ground-with-heavy-air-support notion of being a parent. To be a parent is a role; parenting implies a job.

So, what does that mean?

Under the regime of parenting, raising children became a top priority, an occupation before which all else must yield. The status of children inflated greatly.

I used to joke with the daughter that I couldn't wait for her to become an adult because I could then "snip, snip" those apron strings.  She knew I meant it, and she also knew that she would not let that happen--we live in a world that is far removed from those 1930s and 1940s.  I am an old soul trapped in a much younger body!

One can no longer be merely a parent; one must be—up and at ’em— relentlessly parenting.

A joy it is to read such essays, where the sentences and paragraphs seem so elegantly put together, and to convey simple but profound thoughts.  To think that I would not have known about such pleasures in life if I hadn't doodled away my time back then and now!

Oh, btw, this post itself was interrupted by a call from the daughter; I am, after all, a father in these parenting times! ;)

How much longer for me?

In responding to, and reflecting on, an essay that I had required the class to read, one student agreed with the author that the classics in literature helped her know more about, and understand, herself.  "I learnt a lot about who I am from reading Dickens and others" she said.

Higher education no longer requires students to read the classics.  I recently read in an essay that at many universities, students majoring in English literature can graduate with the highest of honors without having read and analyzed even one of the many plays that Shakespeare penned.  We have courses on Lady Gaga and the history of rock and roll and quite a few other fluffy topics that students can take to fulfill the requirements on their way to earning that piece of paper.

To comment on the changing times, with the changes seemingly for the worse, is perhaps the surest sign of getting older.  The disappointment keeps growing and soon it is an angry, grumpy, old man blabbering something while swinging his walking stick in the air.  And, of course, with every passing day is the seemingly higher probability of death.

George Santayana claimed that one of the reasons older people tend to grumpiness is that they find it difficult to envision a world of any quality in which they will not play a part.

The essay by Joseph Epstein, whom I have quoted more than once in this blog--especially when commenting on the pathetic state of higher education--is also a wonderful reminder of how much the classics can help one understand about life and the self.  His essay, humorous throughout, is a commentary on a series of observations on life and death.  Observations by philosophical and literary giants, most of whom are not a part of the undergraduate canon anymore.

Epstein writes:

The Persian King Xerxes, Herodotus reports, witnessing his more than 2,000 troops massed for the battle to conquer Greece, wept at the thought that “all these multitudes here and yet in 100 years’ time not one of them will be alive.” Then as now the mortality rate remains at 100 percent, with no likelihood of dropping soon.

Could it be that such a passage will be lost on the youth today because they are far removed from death and suffering?  When it was rare for humans to live past 35, surely there was death all around, in contrast to now.  Unless one was systematically protected from witnessing the suffering that life was/is, as was the case with Siddhartha, there was no escaping being a daily witness to death.  Therefore, the learned and the wise thought and spoke and wrote a lot about death.  Epstein writes about Montaigne:

All learning, he believed, was to make us ready for the end, to prepare us for death. “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die” is the title of his essay, and major statement, on the subject. He hoped that when death finally did appear, “it will bear no new warning for me. As far as we possibly can we must have our boots on, ready to go.”

Learning is to prepare for death.  That preparation does not imply that I am ready to check out today; after all, my eating and lifestyle habits are clearly to postpone that expiration date.  Again, Epstein:

The truth is that I have been waiting to die for quite some while now. I do not wish to die, certainly not until, as Socrates says, “life has no more to offer.” I’ve not found that life has anywhere near run out of delight for me. I’ve never considered suicide, though I have, at different times, out of spiritual fatigue, thought I would welcome death. “All is finite,” wrote Santayana, “all is to end, all is bearable—that is my only comfort.”
Yet, though, contra Dylan Thomas, I hope to be allowed to go gently into that good night, I do not figure to welcome death when it arrives.

When that moment comes, I, too, hope to fade gently into that good night.  The "peaceful death" that we sometimes read in obituaries.  And a timely death, in contrast to the "untimely death" that we read about.  I will not struggle because I know I have had one lucky life.  Lucky in my own way, and thematically no different from Epstein's articulation:

I have had a good and lucky run, having been born to honorable and intelligent parents in the most interesting country in the world during a period of unrivaled prosperity and vast technological advance. I prefer to think I’ve got the best out of my ability, and have been properly appreciated for what I’ve managed to accomplish. One may regard one’s death as a tragic event, or view it as the ineluctable conclusion to the great good fortune of having been born to begin with. I’m going with the latter.

If only I knew how much longer for me so that I can decide on whether or not to indulge on chocolate tonight ;)

Poetry is dead. Oh, April is National Poetry Month!

This being National Poetry Month, it is as good a time as any to admit to this much: I rarely, if ever, read the poems in the New Yorker, whose contents I look forward to every week.  I do not find them remotely interesting or informative.  It is simply blah!

I loved poems when I was younger.  In English, yes. In Thamizh. And, even the ones we studied in the Sanskrit curriculum.  Even now, when I am in the mood for a poem, I do not turn to the New Yorker or anything contemporary.  Instead, it is the old ones that appeal to me.  They seem way more profound, and appealing to my emotions of that moment compared to the newer ones that are all flaky.  The rare times that I read anything contemporary, I think that maybe I, too, can become a poet.

Joseph Epstein writes about this in the WSJ:

Like so many people of my rapidly diminishing generation, I walk around with lines and entire passages from the poetry of W.B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, and others rattling around pleasantly in my head. But nearly all the poetry written since the years those poets wrote doesn't register, resonate, ring, do any of the elevating things that poetry is supposed to, and once indeed did, do.

When I read essays like this, I feel convinced, yet again, that despite all the non-conforming attitudes that I display, I am, at heart, a traditionalist.  A neo-traditionalist, as I sometimes describe myself.

Back in Bakersfield, I remember two poetry reading sessions that I attended.  Both were big time poets, and university professors as well.  But, I remember only one of them being awesome, and I even remember the name even after all these years: Frank Bidart.

Yes, Bidart being a native son registered in my memory, as did the controversy related to his sexualtity.    But, those were about Bidart the person about which I couldn't care less.  I remember being drawn into the poem he read.  It was in the old style of epic poems.  I wished that it wouldn't end and that Bidart would continue on.  But, yes, all good things do come to an end.

The other poet was Philip Levine, who had a much shorter drive to make, from Fresno.  I couldn't understand the poems he read, and couldn't wait for the event to end.  Interestingly enough, it seems that Levine is the more celebrated poet, even up to the rank of US Poet Laureate.

So, why is poetry dead?  In noting that "the poetry game is over, kaput, fini, time, gentlemen, time" Epstein explains:

Years ago I wrote an essay on this subject called "Who Killed Poetry?," which stirred up beehives of poets in protest. I suggested that the academicization of poetry did a lot to help kill it; I also concluded that too much poetry was in production, with Gresham's Law relentlessly at work, in this instance the crappy driving out the second-rate. I also concluded that so many people who drifted into the writing of poetry didn't have very interesting minds: a family member dies, they saw a tree of unusual shape, a little-known Matisse painting excited them, so they take to their computers and trivialize the subject or experience by encasing it in a more or less complex contraption of verbal self-absorption currently called a poem.

Come to think of it, I think I didn't like Levine because his came across to me as word play, while Bidart gave me substantive matter to think about.

I shall, therefore, keep going back to the classics.  Some of my own posts reveal my preference for the kinds of poems that appeal to me:

• Back in April 2009, I blogged about Das war schön
• On life and death--a favored obsession of mine--in which I often refer to John Updike's Requiem
• This post on knowledge and wisdom is a twofer--Tennyson and Auden
• Rumi's advice on how to live
• The translation of the lyrics of one of my favorite Hindi film songs ever, from the movie Pyaasa (thirsty)
• A poem, which is almost an atheist anthem: The laws of god
• The young Russophile in me falling in love with Dr. Zhivago and why I cherish Pasternak's After the storm
• Faiz Ahmed Faiz's powerful poem on the freedom of speech
• This post where I admit to be an old-timer in such tastes and I quote Shakespeare
• A favorite of my father's: Abou Ben Adhem
• And, perhaps the one that I quote more often than any other poem, because of the political aspects that drive so much of my blog posts: e.e. cummings' next to of course god america i, which was one of my earliest posts after I restarted this blog in 2008.

Poetry forever!

Vijay, a classmate throughout the school days,
is now a poet/critic/writer