Biggest Drawing In The World..

Something that caught my eye today. With the help of a GPS device equipped suitcase and DHL, Eric Nordenankar attempts a self protrait by recreating the paths the suitcase traveled. There are really no boundaries to human imagination or potential!

Matters of Insignificance…

My morning calm was perturbed by a really insignificant matter today. For those who know me only through this online medium, one of my queer little idiosyncrasies include punctuality. The time on my watch is always 10 minutes ahead, and on the top of it, I try to make it five minutes in advance to the Time I have in mind. So, if I plan for an 7:30 AM morning walk to office, negotiations are rarely allowed.

Most (almost all) of my mornings are heavily dosed with a random discipline of adherence to some schedule, which sounds logical only through retrospective justification. And so was today. My dependence on another person delayed my morning walk at 7:30 by 40 minutes which took me through a phase of disquiet and I ended up taking the cab instead. Just because there was a mismatch between what happened and what I had scheduled to happen, I was jolted out of my composure and couldn’t appreciate the beauty of the moment.

Learning to live in the beauty of the present seems like an eternal pursuit indeed.

A Handful Of Dust

… I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
THE WASTELAND

‘A Handful Of Dust’ from Evelyn Waugh is one of the first and finest satirical fiction that I read since a long time. With an intriguing title lifted from ‘The Wasteland’, Waugh indeed paints a satirical stylish picture of the society through the breakup of the marriage of Brenda and Tony Last. Laced with wry wit, sarcastic humor and subtle irony, Waugh elegantly draws out the superficiality of the upper class.

The novel begins with one of the friend’s of Tony quoting, “I often think Tony Last’s one of the happiest men I know. He’s got just enough money, loves the place, one son he’s crazy about, devoted wife, not a worry in the world.”

Tony is happily married to Brenda and to his Victorian Gothic country home. In love with the happenings around London and bored by the country lifestyle, Brenda fancies herself in love with an opportunistic and worthless social climber Mr. Beaver. When Tony’s Son is killed in an accident, Brenda reveals her affair to Tony and requests for a hefty divorce settlement that forces Tony to sell his home. Betrayed by his wife, Tony embarks on a harebrained expedition to discover a lost city deep in jungles, only to find himself as a prisoner to a Mr.Todd. The novel signs itself with Tony resigning himself to read Charles Dickens’s works to Mr.Todd in jungles for eternity, and Brenda marrying one of the obliging Tony’s friends as her lover Mr. Beaver leaves her for New York, whilst the house went to Tony’s distant relatives.

The novel is filled with impersonal and often cruel satire. Sample this musing of Tony towards the end: “He had always rather enjoyed reading aloud and in the first year of marriage had shared several books in this way with Brenda, until one day, in a moment of frankness, she remarked that it was torture to her.”

The casual tone in which Brenda’s betrayal of Tony is handled and the social sanction it received makes one wonder at the moral corruption of the society. Being Amusing, melodramatic, tragic and cold, Waugh brings out the phoniness of the aristocratic society in a subtle sarcastic fashion that’s beautifully supported by a vividly descriptive style. A great example of dark humor that presents a scathing commentary on the society and the phony relationships.