Of love and happiness

"...men who might have tower'd in the van
Of all the congregated world, to fan
And winnow from the coming steps of time
All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime
Left by men-slugs and human serpentry
Have been content to let occasion die
While they did sleep in love's Elysium."

I quote these words of Keats from memory.

But how true these words are! The lover is an unambitious person because he is a happy person. And happy people don't try to change the world. At most, they might fling a few arrows into the marketplace, and then idle around the beloved.

Thus, the 'movers and shakers' of the world are necessarily not lovers and not happy people. All that the beloved and the lover seek are peace, not tumult.

Perhaps I, too, might have gone into the fray but for the influence of love. Hence, my ardent desire for peace...May we all be at peace. Let lovers unite and marry and live happily ever after.

That is why western ideologies in my country - introduced by ambitious men and women with no love in their lives - disturb my peace because there's no peace in my motherland.

I would try and change it all were it not for the fact of my happiness. Happiness, after all, is the supreme good, and once somebody has achieved it, there's no persuading him to choose any other path.

Three Poems

http://www.theshinejournal.com/sayeediftekhar.htm

(click above for the poems)

Badminton is very popular in this country - it can only be played in winter because at other times it is too windy. So, it's a winter sport. Winter is a metaphor for life's end, but here it becomes the opposite: a metaphor of vitality, strength and youth. sunset at khagrachari was written in the south-eastern hills...it is a place of breathtaking beauty, and the details were there right before my eyes: however, the day was ending and the rising smoke seemed to embody the death of the day...Time was clearly motivated by love ... and the end of love in death. But the focus is not on death, but on the present.

Sister Carrie and the Leisure Class

Sister Carrie and the Leisure Class

(essay at link above)

The year after Thorstein Veblen's classic Theory of the Leisure Class appeared, Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie followed. Coincidence? Not really: the two books shared many of the same themes.



Excerpt:

What of Carrie herself? That she was capable of such sensitivity of feeling testifies to the fact that sensitivity can occur in the absence of wealth – pace Thorstein Veblen. Yet Veblen would have been right about Carrie: her entire view of life was based on the desire for consumption, and a concomitant loathing for production. Therefore, she was sensitive to everything that the leisure class accumulates – from clothes to manners.