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keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
@KS1729
Jan 17, 2023 • 59 tweets • 28 min read • Read on X
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For 2023, a new thread of sentences.

1. “I walked past the brothel as if past the house of a beloved.”

— The Diaries of Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin #KafkaDiaries
2. From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' by Thomas De Quincey Image
3. आशासु शीतलतरासु पयोदतोयै-
राशासिताप्तिविवशेषु च सज्जनेषु ।
नैशाकरोदयविधौ निशि मध्यमायां
क्लेशापहस्त्रिजगतां त्वमिहाविरासी: ॥२॥
4. a great descriptor that conveys बीभत्स : "the mephitic stench from the bilge" Image
5. Kafka’s efforts to seek impossible intimacies by means of careful observations… Image
6. Never ceases to amaze me how extensively ancient Indians kept thinking/arguing/disputing/reframing the question of: what does **meaning** mean? Where does meaning emerge from? Who lends meaningfulness to meaning? Image
7. a phoneme of the Gods is pregnant with recommendations
8. What distinguishes one sentence from another?

ākānkṣa, Divergence of Expectations Image
9. "As Karl Guthke pointed out in The Gender of Death (1999), while Death is feminine in other languages, its masculine gender in German allowed artists to imagine the ‘boneman’ as bridegroom, seducer, rapist." Image
10. "I owe a great deal to Hegel, Goethe, Ghalib, Bedil & Wordsworth. 1st 2 led me into “inside” of things; 3rd & 4th taught me how to remain oriental in spirit & expression aftr having assimilated foreign ideals of poetry, & last saved me frm atheism in my student days."
— Iqbal
11. “There are no masses, only ways of seeing people as a mass.” — Raymond Williams Image
12. “In 1766, Immanuel Kant confessed in a letter: “Indeed, I believe with the firmest conviction and the utmost satisfaction, many things that I will never have the courage to say, but I will never say anything I do not believe.”” Image
13. But what is Time? — Girolamo Cardano Image
14. “How is it, cruelest of hearts, that you’re not ashamed to run after a person you’ve only seen for a moment, aban- doning this person—me!—you’ve grown up with from birth?”

— from ‘Ratnāvali’, a play by the Emperor Harshavardhana, 7thC. Image
15. "In Duryodhana’s way of thinking, contentment yields complacency and can never produce greatness. So he nurtures his resentment until it leads him to embrace a perfidious plan to lure his cousin Yudhishthira to lose every thing in a dicing match, which in turn leads… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
16. "The Four Fates of Man: Death; Soul in Hell; Soul in Purgatory; Soul in Heaven (c.1775), attributed to the Ecuadorian Manuel Chili, was probably intended for a devotional setting, but – as the only work of its kind – is difficult to contextualise. The vividly coloured… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
17. "THERE is a certain shade of red brick-a dark, almost melodious red, sombre and riddled with blue-that is my childhood in St. Louis. Not the real childhood, but the false one that extends from the dawning of consciousness until the day that one leaves home for college. That… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
18. anannatannassamitindriya

The “I-Will-Come-to-Know-What-Is-Unknown” Faculty (Pali)

“In a tradition that posits a deep primordial ignorance pervasive in the unregenerate human condition, this bridge from de- lusion to wisdom provides a necessary lifeline. Else how do we know… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
19. "Finding the real identity beneath the apparent contradiction and differentiation, and finding the substantial diversity beneath the apparent identity, is the most delicate, misunderstood and yet essential endowment of the critic of ideas and the historian of historical… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
20. “A good writer must be in training: if he is a stone too heavy then it must be because that fourteen pounds represents for him so much extra indulgence, so much clogging laziness; in fact a coarsening of his sensibility. There are but two ways to be a good writer (and no… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
21. “Fraternity is the State's bribe to the individual; it is the one virtue which can bring courage to members of a materialist society. All State propaganda exalts comradeship, for it is this gregarious herd-sense and herd-smell which keeps people from thinking and so… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
22. “The narrative thread is deceptively true. Father and son are on a motorcycle holiday, traveling from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas, then across the mountains, turning south to Santa Rosa and the Bay. Asphalt, motels, hairpins in the knife-cold of the Rockies, fog and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
23. “IT MAY WELL be that scholarship of the very first order is as rare as great art or poetry. Some of the gifts and qualities it exacts are obvious: exceeding concentration, a capacious but minutely precise memory, finesse and a sort of pious skepticism in the handling of… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
24. On the complicated friendship between Gershom Scholem & Walter Benjamin ~~ Kabbalah vs Communism

“Scholem bridled at what he intuited, uneasily, to be Benjamin’s imaging of Marxism as a natural variant of Judaic messianic eschatology—of the central Judaic investment in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
25. Walter Benjamin’s letter on June 12, 1938:

“Kafka eavesdropped on tradition, and he who listens hard does not see.
The main reason why this eavesdropping demands such effort is that only the most indistinct sounds reach the listener. There is no doctrine that one… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
26. “There is not the least doubt that Pietro Catte in the abstract has no reality, any more than any other man on the face of the earth. But the fact remains that he was born and that he died, as those irrefutable certificates prove. And this endows him with reality in actual… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
27. “Solzhenitsyn, a theocratic anarchist, has little esteem for reason, particularly when it stems from the “intellectual,” from the man who makes his more or less mundane living by dispassion. In the presence of the inhuman, reason is often a small—indeed, a laughable—agent.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
28. "How many villains and knaves interfered in Prague's affairs and set up camp here over the decades and centuries: rodomonts, all gilt armour and puffed-up chests jingling with trinkets; plump friars of every order; prelates from the gates of hell; Obergauner in sidecars… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
29. What matters more: social order sustained by lies OR chaos nourished by truth? Image
30. Kausari, a Safavid poet at the court of Shah Tahmasp, declared in despair:

darin kishvar kharidar-i sukhan nist
kasi sargarm-i bazar-i sukhan nist
sukhan ra qadr u miqdari namanda
ma‘ani ra kharidar namanda
ki dar Iran kasi nayad padidar
ki bashad jins-i ma‘ni ra kharidar… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
31. "...we can form an adequate picture of the world only if we begin to think the long-forgotten nexus of space, time, and action. We have repressed this elementary insight for so long that it is worth our while to bring it back into play." Image
32. on the Flâneur

"Every form of movement corresponds to a specific mode of cognition. The flâneur drifts. He is interested not in the whither but in the where. He paces out. He has his own rhythm, now ambling, now pacing briskly. He walks around; he follows up. He does not… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
33.
34.
35. “According to the philosopher Mazviita Chirimuuta, ‘colours are not properties of minds, objects or lights, but of perceptual processes – interactions that involve all three terms’. In what she calls ‘colour adverbialism’, colours are not properties of things but ways that… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
36. "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
37. The description of a calendar.

“Three hundred and sixty milking cows (7) give birth to a single calf,(8) the creator and destroyer of time. The calves are in different sheds, but they suckle the same truth. The Ashvins milk them of true knowledge. There are 720 spokes on… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
38. "T. H. Green's Idealistic defense of the retributive function of punishment was vitiated by his disregard for psychological observation. That "the state cannot be supposed capable of vindictive passion" may be true as far as ordinary language goes; but Green's peremptory… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
39.
40. "one year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny" ImageImage
41. “Kalidasa’s treatment of Kanva’s ashram is relevant even beyond his borrowing of particular points from Asvaghosa in composing his play, the ‘Abhijnana Shakuntala’. The very existence of the play itself may have sprung from a remark by Ashwaghosha, who mentioned that the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
42. "The womb is itself a paradoxical thing. In preparing for pregnancy, an entirely new organ, the placenta, is created. It infiltrates the uterine blood vessels and grows over 150 miles of capillaries to provide nutrients and oxygen to the developing fetus before it is… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
43. “Friedrich Nietzsche, a young philologist who had worked up to that point on Greek texts and had two years earlier achieved an unexpected celebrity with The Birth of Tragedy, published the Un zeitgemässe Betrachtungen, the Untimely Meditations, a work in which he tries to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
44. Where is ‘past’ and ‘future’ born from?

“[Ludwig] Boltzmann has shown that entropy exists because we describe the world in a blurred fashion. He has demonstrated that entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
45.

"My father grew up in an era when to be an American—a white American, at least—was to be yourself. In some respects his generation was more ignorant, complacent, self-centered and parochial than mine. For better and for worse, it actually believed in progress, which is to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
46. “In the year 387, Plato returned to Athens from his trip to southern Italy, where he had sought contact with the Pythagoreans. It is the trip that is also known as the first Sicilian one and that brought the philosopher, who was at that time forty years old, into the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
47. "At the end of the Second World War, Arthur Koestler wrote a lucid essay, ‘The Yogi and the Commissar’, in which he typologically contrasted the two fundamental responses of the twentieth century to the misery of the world, the response of the yogi, who chooses the path… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
48. “In 1935, Jung said: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read Zarathustra will know that… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
49. “Still, returning to the life of Gustave Flaubert, Sartre would have us regard with sympathy this poor idiot of the Flaubert family: “Worst of all, he condemns himself in advance—he judges himself according to the norms the Flauberts have adopted”. Gustave Flaubert can never… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
50. On poets & politics:

"On the local level, late-thirteenth-century northern Italy (Milano, to the north, and Rome, to the south, are barely on Dante’s personal political map; rather we hear, in addition to Florence, of such cities as Genoa, Pisa, Pistoia, Siena, etc.) was… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
51. nā́sad āsīn nó sád āsīt tadā́nīṃ
nā́sīd rájo nó víomā paró yát
kím ā́varīvaḥ kúha kásya śármann
ámbhaḥ kím āsīd gáhanaṃ gabhīrám…

“The hymn does not describe cosmogony, but it in some sense is cosmogony. The unfolding of the hymn itself is an act of creation; the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
52. "Everyone during the communist time promised us a bright future. Now, thirty years later, the populists are trying to sell me the pay cheque of the past. Don't believe anyone who tries to sell you the past or future, the cheques are empty.” -- Georgi Gospodinov Image
53. "A wider and equally shaky rear-view mirror opinion is that the [1848] revolutions were a failure. It certainly felt like one to their participants, as counter-revolution prevailed. Social and political reaction submerged their Europe under a flood of executions,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
54. "Lucien Febvre in an entertaining article, imagined how astonished Herodotus would be if he were to repeat his itinerary today, at the flora which we think of as typically Mediterranean: orange, lemon and mandarin trees imported from the Far East by the Arabs; cactus from… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
55. "PALAVRAS NUM SILÊNCIO DE OURO. WORDS IN GOLDEN SILENCE. When I read a newspaper, listen to the radio or overhear what people are saying in the café, I often feel aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over-at the same expressions, phrases, and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
56. "I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself. Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
57. “Iraqis and palm trees. Who resembles whom? There are millions of Iraqis and as many, or perhaps somewhat fewer, palm trees. Some have had their fronds burned. Some have been beheaded. Some have had their backs broken by time, but are still trying to stand. Some have dried… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
58. "The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it. A cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles toward a reckoning… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
59. "What Alzheimer discovered under the microscope would make history. Inside Auguste [Deter]’s brain, Alzheimer saw neurons in various degrees of disintegration, seemingly destroyed by fibrils, or tiny fibers, growing inside them. In some neurons, one or several fibrils could… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image

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More from @KS1729

keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
Dec 30, 2022
A thread of Indian paintings, from 1900 to 2022, arranged according to year of creation. One painting per year.

Many works & artists missing. 🙏

My hope was to *see* the changes in Indian aesthetics—from Colonialism to Covid.
1900 -- Traveller and Lotus -- Abanindranath Tagore Image
1901 -- Shakuntala -- Raja Ravi Varma Image
Read 125 tweets
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
Mar 21, 2022
Like, An Experiment

***

Call me,
like a grasshopper in a May meadow
like silent sentinels all around the town
like leaves upon this shepherd’s head
like a snow hill in the air.
like a candle moving about in a tomb.
like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs,
like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower
like a corkscrew,
like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man
like another cursed Jonah,
like a bench on the Battery
like a coffer-dam
like an ape
like a string of inions
like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin
like a hamper
like lightning
like a mildewed
like polished ebony
like a tenpin between the andirons
like a strip of that same patchwork quilt
like a Newfoundland dog just from the water
Read 8 tweets
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
Mar 2, 2022
Narendra Pachkhede on G. N. Devy's new book abt the relationship b/w India & Mahabharata: "He does not dwell on what is the relationship of this greatest literary work with our people, but rather he delves into how this relationship functions."
thewire.in/books/gn-devy-…
"The allure of the Mahabharata and how it provides insight into its cultural memory in India could be best explained through the idea of a controlling text – a reference point for all thinkers and a recourse to fall back on for the nation."
This review also kindly makes a mention of my book and compares it to the writings of Hilda Doolittle and her poems marked by Greek/Roman myth. Didn't know who she was so had to google her. 😎 literaryladiesguide.com/classic-women-…
Read 4 tweets
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
Feb 10, 2022
For 2022, a new thread of sentences.
Read freely, quote happily, attribute with caution. For a similar threads from 2021 and 2018-20, see 👇🏼:

1. “The verb “to lose” has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the “lorn” in “forlorn.” It comes from an Old English 1/3
word meaning to perish, which comes from an even older word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object only appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. 2/3
In the sixteenth century we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and each other and has been steadily expanding ever since.”

Kathryn Schulz

3/3
Read 57 tweets
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
Jul 19, 2021
A story about the Gibraltar skull, involving Darwin, always reminds me of how difficult it is to truly speak about the world as we see it. This incident, involving the skull, in a world-historic life such as Darwin's often reminds me of a line by V. S. Naipaul.

A short thread.
In 1864, Charles Darwin had been very sick for weeks. (He suffered various ailments for much of his adult life.)

To "see how I stand change", he and his wife, Emma Darwin arrived at 4 Chester Place in London where his sister-in-law Sarah Wedgewood lived.

[Charles & Emma]
It was a convenient location for Darwin because despite being sick, he could walk over to the Royal Botanical Society and the Zoological Society. In those months and past few years he was writing a book/monograph on climbing plants then.
Read 12 tweets
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
May 2, 2021
12. Who was Jacques Derrida?

A great conversation with Peter Salmon (who talks admirably fast!) on his wonderful biography of Derrida's works & public persona that has metastasized & fragmented, often disallowing for any meaningful coherence to emerge. traffic.libsyn.com/secure/philoso… Image
13. On Daya Krishna, who per Daniel Raveh was one of the most interesting philosophers (not just Indian philosophers) of the 2nd half of 20thC. A book that distills DK's last decade & his efforts to read through Indian texts imaginatively and critically. traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5587148690.… Image
14. At age 80, veteran China scholar Orville Schell has published his first novel. My Old Home: A Novel of Exile -- a bildungsroman from the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen in 1989. On the worlds fiction can open & change in modern Chinese history.  chrt.fm/track/47257E/p… Image
Read 21 tweets

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