Where do you want to go?

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where-" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll (January 27, 1832–January 14, 1898)

Brave New World

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

Brave New World, 1932
Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

One of my all time favorite books. Discovered it a long long time ago in the dusty shelves of an almost untouched fiction section in my college library. I have not stopped reading it since. It was just the lateral shift my mind needed.

High Fidelity

I want to be a well-rounded human being with none of these knotty lumps of rage and guilt and self-disgust. What do I want to do when I see them? I don't know. Just talk. Ask them how they are and whether they have forgiven me for messing them around, when I have messed them around, and tell them that I have forgiven them for messing me around, when they have messed me around. Wouldn't that be great? If I saw all of them in turn and there were no hard feelings left, just soft downy feelings, Brie rather than old hard Parmesan, I'd feel clean, and calm, and ready to start again.

Bruce Springsteen's always doing it in his songs. Maybe not always, but he's done it. You know that one "Bobby Jean" off Born in the USA? Anyway, he phones this girl up but she's left town years before and he's pissed off that he didn't know about it, because he wanted to say good-bye, and tell her that he missed her, and to wish her good luck. And then one of those sax solos comes in, and you get goose pimples, if you like sax solos. And Bruce Springsteen. Well, I'd like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen songs. Just once. I know I'm not born to run, I know that the Seven Sisters' Road is nothing like Thunder Road, but feelings can't be so different, can they? I'd like to phone all those people up and say good luck, and good-bye, and then they'd feel good and I'd feel good. We'd all feel good. That would be good. Great, even.

High Fidelity, 1996
Nick Hornby (1957 - )

The Road goes ever on and on

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Lord Of The Rings , 1954-1955

JRR Tolkien (Jan 3, 1892 to Sept 2,1973)

Vox

All of the songs he liked faded out, or most them did. And so I became a connoisseur of fade outs. I bought cassettes...and listened very closely, trying to catch that precise moment when the person in the recording studio had begun to turn the volume dial down, or whatever it was he did. Some times I'd turn the volume dial up at just the same speed. I thought of...the ghostly hand of the producer turning it down, so that the sound stayed on an even plane. I'd got to this sort of trance...where I thought that if I kept turning it up...the song would not stop, it would just continue indefinitely. And so what I had thought of before as a kind of artistic sloppiness, this attempt to imply that oh yeah, we're a bunch of endlessly creative folks who jam all night, and the bad old record producer finally has to turn the volume down on us just so we don't fill the whole album with one monster song, became for me instead this kind of, this kind of summation of hopefulness.

...

It’s the same with shadows. The beautiful thing isn’t the alligators or bats you can make with your hands, the beautiful thing is the way the shadow image allows you to see so precisely what the outer contour of your own hand really looks like, those little bunches of flesh under bent finger joint.

Vox, 1992
Nicholson Baker (1952 - )

Fifteen Men On The Dead Man's Chest

"Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

Treasure Island, 1883
Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 3, 1894)

One of my favorite childhood books!

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

"And even though I testify about the terrible human state, and its rescue by the sanctity of Jesus, what, what, what in this annus dominus are we brought to, we the laborers, the artisans, the cooks of linseed stew?" The Master throws his brush across the room. "They want flowers, flowers for commerce, beauty to sell as if it had its own sake! Why don't the dreamless Calvinists just go off to Constantinople? Why don't they join the pagan Mohammedans who rebuke the notion of portraying divinity in anything but Euclidean tiles of blue and gold? Or why don't I just take myself to the Spanish Netherlands and set myself up there? Where I can paint what I want, and keep food on the table as well?"

....

"Another maiden in the house" says the Prince, and then looking back at Iris, remembering, "your stepsister, the one who minds the hearth"
Iris nods.
"Let her try the slipper" say Margarethe wildly, perhaps to shift the attention of the Prince from the sniffles of Ruth.
"There is no need; the slipper was merely a ruse to get you to open the door to me" says the Prince. "A ruse, I see, that I did not even need to enact." But Clara has come forward and taken the slipper from where it was fallen.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, 1999
Gregory Maguire (1954 - )

A Bend In The River

I began to understand how simple and uncomplicated the world was for me. For people like myself and Mahesh, and the uneducated Greeks and Italians in our town, the world was really quite a simple place. We could understand it, and if too many obstacles weren't put in our way we could master it. It didn't matter that we were far away from our civilization, far away from the doers and the makers. It didn't matter that we couldn't make the things we liked to use, and as individuals were even without the technical skills of primitive people. If fact, the less educated we were, the more at peace we were, the more easily we were carried along by our civilization or civilizations.

For Ferdinand there was no such possibility. He could never be simple. The more he tried, the more confused he became. His mind wasn't empty, as I had begun to think. It was a jumble, full of all kinds of junk.

A Bend In The River, 1979
V. S. Naipaul (1932- )

Moby Dick

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Moby Dick (1851)
Herman Melville (1819 – 1891)

India: From Midnight to the Millennium

"India," Winston Churchill once barked, "is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator." Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does.

And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, in the words of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, "by strong but invisible threads.... About her there is the elusive quality of a legend of long ago; some enchantment seems to have held her mind. She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive."

India: From Midnight to the Millennium, 1997
Shashi Tharoor (1956 - )

The Best Of Times, The Worst Of Times

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."


A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812 – June 9, 1870)

The Ginger Man - J. P. Donleavy

But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both it's health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.

The Ginger Man, 1955
J. P. Donleavy (1923 - )

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

It doesn't say much. Only 'Howard Roark, Architect.' But it's like those mottoes men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It's a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth-and do you know how much suffering there is on earth?-all the pain comes from that thing you are going to face. I don't know what it is, I don't know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it will be. And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world-and never wins acknowledgement. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer. May God bless you-or whoever it is that is alone to see the best, the highest possible to human hearts. You're on your way into hell, Howard.

The Fountainhead, 1943
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)