“He is Great Who Can Alter My State of Mind”

Tags

'The American Scholar', AKS Diaries, R W Emerson

Today, we bring a brief excerpt recorded by AKS from ‘The American Scholar’ of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 –1882)), the legendary American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, and is viewed as a champion of individualism. The introductory lines ofhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar state: ‘The American Scholar was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America’s fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country’s history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping “from under its iron lids” and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.’–AKSCENTRE

24.10.2007

From “The American Scholar” by R.W. Emerson:

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance–by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

R W Emerson

Nor he is great who can alter matter, but who can alter my state of mind.

I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give one insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.

To read the full essay, ‘The American Scholar’, you can visit this website: http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm

“Ask Someone Where We Are”

Tags

AKS Diaries, Greek Tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles

Today, we reproduce these opening lines of the Sophocles’ play Oedipus at Colonus as recorded by AKS.  This is of the three Theban plays or trilogy of the Athenian tragedian Sophocles (c. 497/6 BC- c. 406/5 BC), with the other two being Oedipus the Rex and Antigone. For the uninitiated, the explanatory lines taken from http://www.litcharts.com/lit/oedipus-at-colonus/themes are also being brought here for a better understanding of the context of these opening lines: ‘Long before the beginning of Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus has fulfilled one of the most famous prophecies in world literature—that he would kill his father and marry his mother (these events are covered in detail in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex). Despite his efforts to avoid this terrible fate, it came to pass. When Oedipus learned what he had inadvertently done, he gouged out his own eyes, and was banished from Thebes. As Oedipus at Colonus begins, Oedipus is nearing the end of his life.’ AKSCENTRE

12.03.2005

Opening lines of Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus”, Tr. by E.F. Watling (Penguin Classics)

 

Enter from the country Oedipus, white -haired, blind, and in squalid garments, guided by his daughter, Antigone.

Oedipus at Colonus by Fulchran-Jean Harriet, 1798, Cleveland Museum of Art
Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_at_Colonus

Oedipus: Tell me, Antigone – where have you come to now

With your blind old father?

What is this place, my child?

Country, or town? Whose turn is it to-day

to offer a little hospitality to the wandering Oedipus?

It’s little I ask, and am well content with less.

Three masters – pain, time, and the royalty in the blood –

Have taught me patience. Is there a resting place,

My child, where I could sit, on common ground

Or in same sacred close? And while I rest,

Ask someone where we are.

 

“The ‘I am Ready for Anything’ Look of D H Lawrence”

Tags

AKS Diaries, D H Lawrence

Today, we reproduce the passages from Catherine Carswell’s biography of D H Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage, which was first published in 1932. Catherine Carswell (1879-1946), a Scottish author, biographer and journalist, is more famously known for her not-so-flattering and controversial biography of the legendary Scottish poet Robert Burns. However, the passages from this biography as recorded by AKS in his diary, have not been taken in continuity. Lawrence’s views on marriage, his lesser known play ‘Touch and Go’, his impressions of foreign lands such as Italy, Ceylone, Australia, Taos and finally his comparsion of America with Europe have been put together by AKS– making transitions through one line comments or simply through signs like XX; the page nos. have not been mentioned. This needs to be mentioned that for AKS, D H Lawrence, with all his imperfections, was in a sense epitome of a perfect artist. Thus, interestingly, amidst these discussions, one finds that a small passage about the ‘fiercely or sufferingly thoughtful’ photographs or portraits of Lawrence as opposed to his ‘usual sparkling awareness’, as observed by Carswell, recorded in the diary. AKSCENTRE

 —-

It is, I think, a misfortune that by far the most of the photographs and portraits of Lawrence show him as thoughtful – either fiercely or sufferingly so. His usual expression was a kind of sparkling awareness, almost as “I am ready for anything” look which was invigorating to behold.

D H Lawrence
Photo Courtesy: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/

 

Early 1922, while on way to Ceylon: ”I think one must for the moment withdraw from the world away towards the inner realities that are real: and return, may be, to the world later, when one is quiet and sure. I am tired of the world, and want the peace like a river: not this whisky and soda, bad whisky too, of life so-called. I don’t believe in Buddhistic inaction and meditation. But I believe the Buddhistic peace is the point to start from – not our strident fretting and squabbling.”

 

To read the full excerpts please click here: https://akscentre.wordpress.com/aks-diaries-excerpts-and-fragments/

“Conflict Is An Inescapable Social Fact”

Tags

AKS Diaries, Alvin Toffler

28 July 05

Assumptions

(on which Alwin Toffler’s ‘Power Shifts’ is based, in his own words)

1. Power is inherent in all social systems and in all human relationships.  It is not a thing but an aspect of any and all relationships among people. Hence it is inescapable and neutral, intrinsically neither good nor bad.

2. The ‘power system’ includes everyone – no one is free of it.  But one person’s power loss is not always another’s gain.

Alvin Toffler

3. The power system in any society is subdivided into smaller and smaller power subsystems nested within one another.  Feedback links these subsystems to one another, and to the larger systems of which they are part.  Individuals are embedded in many different, though related, power subsystems.

4. The same person may be power-rich at home and power-poor at work, and so forth.

5. Because human relationships are constantly changing, power relationships are also in constant process.

6. Because people have needs and desires, those who can fulfill them hold potential power.  Social power is exercised by supplying or withholding the desired or needed items and experiences.

7. Because needs and desires are highly varied, the ways of meeting or denying them are also extremely varied.  There are, therefore, many different ‘tools’ or ‘levers’ of power.  Among them, however, violence, wealth and knowledge are primary.  Most other power resources derive from these.

8. Violence, which is chiefly used to punish, is the least versatile source of power.  Wealth, which can be used to both reward and punish, and which can be converted into many other resources, is a far more flexible tool of power. Knowledge, however, is the most versatile and basic since it can help one avert challenges that might require the use of violence and wealth, and can often be used too persuade others to perform in desired ways out of perceived self-interest.  Knowledge yields the highest quality power.

11/8/05
9. The relationship of classes, races, genders, professions, nations, and other social groupings are incessantly altered by shifts in population, ecology, technology, culture, and other factors.  These changes lead to conflict and translate into redistribution of power resources.

10. Conflict is an inescapable social fact.

11. Power struggles are not necessarily bad.

—

To read the full excerpts please click here, https://akscentre.wordpress.com/aks-diaries-excerpts-and-fragments/

“…Every Blessing Ignored Becomes A Curse”

Tags

AKS Diaries, Paulo Coelho

 23/07/2008

From Paulo Coelho’s ‘The Alchemist’

 [1] ” I’ve had this shop for thirty years. I know good crystal from bad, and everything else there is to know about crystal. I know its dimensions and how it behaves. It we serve tea in crystal, the shop is going to expand. And then I’ll have to change my way of life.”

            “Well is n’t that good?”

            “I’m already used to the way things are. Before you came, I was thinking about how much time I had wasted in the same place, while my friends had moved on, and either went bankrupt or did better than they had before. It made me very depressed. Now, I can see that it had n’t been too bad. The shop is exactly the size I always wanted it to be. I don’t want to change anything, because I don’t know how to deal with change. I’m used to the way I am.”

             The boy did n’t know what to say. The old man continued. “You have been a real blessing to me. Today, I understand something I did n’t see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things you should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.”

             …And as he smothered the coals in the hookah, he told the boy that he could begin to sell tea in the crystal glasses. Sometime, there’s just no way to hold back the river.

 X X X

             The Englishman was fascinated with the part about the progress achieved at the crystal shop after the boy began working there.

“That’s the principle that governs all things”, he said. “In alchemy, it’s called the soul of the world. When you want something with all your heart, that’s when you are closest to the Soul of the world. It’s always a positive force.

            He also said that this was not just a human gift, that everything on the face of the earth had a soul, whether mineral, vegetable, or animal – or even just a simple thought.

            “Everything on earth is being continuously transformed, because the earth is alive … and it has a soul. We are part of that soul so we rarely recognize that it is working for us. But in the crystal shop you probably realized that even the glasses were collaborating in your success.”

To read more excerpts recorded in AKS Diaries, please click here: https://akscentre.wordpress.com/aks-diaries-excerpts-and-fragments/