Utsob Roy

It has been suggested, for instance, that the Mahābhārata, the great early Sanskrit epic, owes a debt to the Iliad and to the Odyssey, with the theme of the abduction of Lady Sita by Rāvaa a direct echo of the elopement of Helen with Paris of Troy.

It is supposed to be Rāmāyana, not Mahābhārata. Mistakes like this, and that also in the first few pages made me skeptical about the quality of this book.

Beyond that, I found this book enlightening. Writing a history based on how businesses have been made (and related things like coercion and war) is a very refreshing read.

Until you finish it, you'll never notice how well-crafted this novel is. That is how good art or literature should be. It will hide the craftsmanship. The narrative was concise, flowing, and captivating.

Another thing not strictly about this book is, I envy authors who (though being a man) can portray women such a way that it compels you to think that they know women from the depth of their psychology. I know they don't know everything about women. However, they can create a character which may not be like ‘This is how women are' but will be like ‘this is also how a woman can be'. Dazai can do this very well.

I really don't know what to say. Annoying yet funny.

A bet between God and the Devil. A shrewdness beyond comprehension to the mind of a man. A tragedy.

If only this were the case, the oldest of all stories of Christianity, then Goethe probably wouldn't have ventured to write Faust.

Faust is a blueprint. A blueprint of tragedy that an intellectual, curious, and rigorous philosopher may have to navigate in his life.

At the beginning, when we meet Faust the polymath, he was in Loevinger’s Ego Development Stage 4/5 (Self-Questioning/Individualist/Pluralist). The notions of reality and truth are fractured, yet not in complete disharmony. We can find the evidence for it in Scene IV:

This life of earth, whatever my attire, Would pain me in its wonted fashion. Too old am I to play with passion; Too young, to be without desire.

and,

The God that in my breast is owned Can deeply stir the inner sources; The God, above my powers enthroned, He cannot change external forces. So, by the burden of my days oppressed, Death is desired, and Life a thing unblest!

This stage comes with acute existential dread and distress, as Goethe portrayed them so faithfully.

We need to make a clear distinction here. This distress is not the work of the Devil. Every sincere person, at some point in their life, must stomach this. In consensus, Christianity allows free will; therefore, free exploration of knowledge is allowed. With that exploration, considering the depth and breadth a philosopher may navigate, comes obvious distress.

At this lowest of the moments, Faust made a pact with Mephistopheles. Here, we can see the brilliance of Faust's mind. While Mephistopheles wanted to give all possible earthly pleasure in return for his soul, Faust's counter-offer was to forfeit his soul only when he is content. And if you consider his state of mind at this point, bringing contentment to him is a formidable task, even for Mephistopheles— if Mephistopheles is a man.

But Mephistopheles is no man. While a man, with his short span of life, and probably by the very architecture of our mind, cannot help thinking from the perspective where we are the centre of everything. This egocentrism is the Devil's playground. He runs a whole gamut of tests on all of our feelings to catch us off guard:

MEPHISTOPHELES Yes, thou findest that unpleasant! Thou hast the moral right to cry me "shame!" at present. One dares not that before chaste ears declare, Which chaste hearts, notwithstanding, cannot spare; And, once for all, I grudge thee not the pleasure Of lying to thyself in moderate measure.

Indeed, he is right when he declares:

MEPHISTOPHELES Poor Son of Earth, how couldst thou thus alone Have led thy life, bereft of me?

For he is the first rebel in the Bible, and he, also, is the scapegoat for all our dubitable actions.

But Mephistopheles is an egoist too. Soon, it became a chess match of ego. In every turn, one superseding another's strategy. Although by narrow means, Faust conquered all the traps and lures. You may disagree with me on this point. But this conquering happens in such a bloody, agonising way that it often may feel like a defeat.

We can see their battle externalised in Walpurgis Night:

Tell me, if we still are standing, Or if further we're ascending? All is turning, whirling, blending, Trees and rocks with grinning faces, Wandering lights that spin in mazes, Still increasing and expanding! MEPHISTOPHELES Grasp my skirt with heart undaunted! Here a middle–peak is planted, Whence one seeth, with amaze, Mammon in the mountain blaze.

First, we find Faust's mind-bending philosophical investigation being externalised by a metaphor of Will-O-Wisp.

Then we see the satanic promise of remedy, but not through philosophy, but through materialism, by promising Mammon's treasure.

Despite every attempt, despite a tragic end, we can see Faust keeping his intellectual sovereignty intact. A prime example of this is when Gretchen, the innocent lover of Faust, asked him about his faith; he replied:

FAUST My darling, who shall dare "I believe in God!" to say? Ask priest or sage the answer to declare, And it will seem a mocking play, A sarcasm on the asker.

This is not a lack of faith, but a sincerity. A sincerity that the person should show if his faith or belief is not handed down to him and accepted as is.

Faust was right in thinking that Mephistopheles, indeed, cannot make him content. No worldly pleasure (or, even woe) can deter him, ultimately, from the philosophical distress of his soul, a tragedy most intimate, a tragedy wrought in his soul, which no diversion can touch.

It was a stalemate, at least, at the end of this book.

This is an autobiographical work; therefore, what the author was thinking is much more important than the literary quality. But again, all a writer could do is write themselves. So this is also about the style.

What I found about him reading this one is that Hemingway is a man deeply embedded in reality. A person who likes people, cats, dogs, and children, and wants to write a really good story. That is all that matters to him. I never found him philosophising beyond the level that the first interaction allows him to. Text is not dense, but superbly tactile. And somehow, he can make the emotions tactile too.

Hemingway's brand of realism has, unfortunately, become a mundane genre in the hands of his successors. Their shallow sense of reality did great disservice to the genre. That is why they never could've produced a line like this:

The trees were sculpture without their leaves when you were reconciled to them,

Or, three lines so dense that they cover a whole gamut of class-conflict, longing, baseness, hostility, and charming sarcasm:

“I just came in to have a drink. What’s wrong with that?” “At home they’d serve you and then break the glass.” “Where’s home? It sounds like a charming place.”

Another thing that many realist writers cannot do is widen the reality. Here's an example:

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

In their narrow sense of reality, they completely ignore the most interesting aspect of reality— temporality. They act as if they are buffers on a tape and caught by the temporality of the story itself, and possess neither the capacity for retrospection, nor the prescience. Their story, in turn, feels like frames in a film I am holding in my hand instead of a movie I see.