Von's: books in the basement

There is a lovely local book-shop near campus called Von's, which I used to visit an awful lot in my first year. These last some years I've gone there less often and I have some reasons for that. Every now and again when I do drop in - I spend a considerable amount of time there. I go and settle myself in a comfy couch in the children's book-section with a pile of books to browse through. I'm never bothered and no one chases me away. I do feel wistful every now and again when I'm there inside the book-shop.

For a while now I have known that Von's has a used book section down in the basement. Somehow I've never prodded myself to go down there. I know that most likely sounds odd. Why ever not, one may ask....I am not really sure whether I want to share the reasons (batty as they are). Today I did go over to Von's. And I did go down into the book-filled human-empty basement. I ended up buying four books. And as I went in and out of the aisles looking and fingering and leafing through the old books (some older than others) - I wondered (among very many other things) how people can find reading books on a kindle half as satisfying. Some comparisons come to mind - but let me desist. I did feel wistful all the while down in the basement and some book titles made me gulp loudly.

On my way in and on my way out I saw one occupant - an elderly gentleman at the far end of one of the aisles who was quite comfortably sprawled out on the floor with his head resting in one of his palms reading a book, completely oblivious to the world. He could have been reading at home - he looked so comfy. I didn't travel up and down that aisle because I would have felt like an intruder.

Middle of the Week

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

I'm tempted to write nothing but put up the above quote but of course I'll go on (with what will become I am sure a gloomy rant. It may be otherwise but I rather doubt it).

Some weeks ago, was it, or days - never mind - I came across that liner again "life is one damned thing after another." I don't know whether the original quote actually starts off with 'life' or with 'history' (I’ll check once I finish writing the post) - but even that matters not much for the purposes of the current bit. I wonder more whether life is the same damned thing over and over again. I will try as I sometimes do, not to ramble. But after weeks of not writing here, all the thoughts start banging against each other demanding to be heard and it becomes very difficult to stay on track. So I apolgise to the few readers who do visit this blog and read my posts.

Yet another semester has begun. The first week is always my favourite. Almost nothing goes wrong even in a class of 90 students packed in, in a-not-too-large of a space. I am focused (don’t ask me why or how), I don’t ramble, I make jokes (but in context – at least not out of context), and I form some coherent sentences of my own but I keep asking leading questions so that the students themselves come up with the answers, which I then write on the board. The students seem happy and engaged on the whole. I am happy and almost prancing around the whole length and breadth of the classroom. Something of course starts going wrong somewhere after that magical first week, and I’m not really sure even now what all the factors are. Part of it I know is my tendency to ramble, my unpreparedness for a sudden question or a sudden strand (which I don’t know whether to ignore or whether to somehow incorporate into the discussion), my mind blanking on me and a whole lot has to do with the way I start approaching the class after that one magical week or so. But all that can wait too for another day.

I can’t help but be reminded of my own first encounters with sociology when I was in college. I can’t say that the whole discipline fascinated me equally (it still doesn’t). I never got a hang of stats (sadly enough) and I never really could for the life of me remember dates and many related strings of information that would have helped immensely, and these days more than most of the research papers I read leave me unimpressed and untouched. However, I still remember one of the topics that fascinated me when I had started on the discipline and the topic holds my interest even now. I don’t however know whether that interest has become any deeper or whether it has matured some over the last decade and some years. That topic was “freedom and determinism”.
Many years ago I read some liners which had made me chortle. A black woman was told, “But you have to stop smoking…” and she had replied, “On this earth – I am born and I have to die. The first one’s happened. I’ll have to do the second. Ain’t a thing more that I have to do. I choose to do the rest.” Hmm.

During my years in college and a year or two prior to them I remember watching a lot of programs on the Discovery channel which talked about the brain, the mind, and behaviour, and those programs brought in hundreds of other questions and musings – most of which got carefully written down in my diaries. At that point of course I fancied that I would take up something like clinical psychology in later years somehow…The question of freedom and determinism would haunt me in very many more ways (and some bizarre ways) over the next many years but I didn’t know that back then. I was also madly, blindly and absolutely feverishly reading anything and everything that Ayn Rand had written, writing about most of it in my diaries, arguing with myself and disagreeing and agreeing. The real thinking over would happen some years later. Not then. I read some other books too (I think) but I was nothing in my college years if I wasn’t an Ayn Rand fanatic. I was a Richard Bach fanatic too during the same time.

My professor in college – one of the finest teachers, in fact I’d have to say the finest teacher that I have come across in a formal setting – is the one who introduced the topic of ‘determinism and freedom’ in class and got me interested in a focused way, and for months and two years I pondered more on this question than anything and everything else combined. I had discussions and debates with my professor in the class, and he would answer and sometimes throw back a question at me. Not once did he ask me to shut up nor did he tell me that I was holding up the class. I have no idea why or how he had the patience to answer my questions (some of which must have sounded quite silly and uninformed) and I don’t have any idea how he never got distracted with my endless questioning and sometimes vehement and mutinous badgering. Nor do I know how he finished the syllabus. The same professor was forced to send me out of the class once. But only because I had stopped asking questions and stopped paying attention in his class. Come to think of it, I don’t know whether I would have stuck to sociology if we hadn’t had this one professor when I was in college.

Many years later (sometimes it feels like a lifetime although it couldn’t have been more than five years or so) I came across a human being who was even more patient, even more interested in what I had to say and ask, even more painstaking and for a whole year, through letters though it was (and humongous letters at that), he managed to nudge me into taking a closer and more refined look at things. Of course if anyone had to tell me that back then I would have snorted. I didn’t like to think that this one human being had managed to nudge me into taking a tempered view regarding many issues – social and non-social ones. I don’t know why. Maybe it was my colossal ego for I know I had one – a much larger one some seven years ago. I even happen to remember how in one snap he stopped me from being the rather indifferent agnostic that I had been. No sermons. No flashing divine insight. No. But the message was contained in a couple of innocuous liners and a nudging reminder of Meerabai for some reason made me remember that I did believe in God.

How free are human beings? What is freedom? Are we determined? By what/whom? At how many levels does freedom exist? What about determinism? At how many levels are we controlled and determined? What forms of determinism exist? Political, economic, cultural, and social too (and if one wants to set up a neat little barriers one may add blind habit, custom, and tradition maybe to the list)? Maybe genetics? Who knows? Why leave out fear? What other elements control us then? Where does it end then this control? What does it mean to be free in an enlightened way? Can human beings really be free? What would that order of living be? And no matter how ‘unacademic’ it sounds – what about karma? And what about love? Doesn’t love both control us and make us free ? And what’s the point in freedom really or any state of exalted grace – no matter how glorious or however absolute – if there is no love that is fulfilling and absolute contained in that state of being?
....Limited vision and grand questioning probably never were meant to go together.

I had told a friend in college that if I ever taught sociology – I would talk about two things in the first couple of classes and more: one would be to talk about and elaborate upon the words and the meanings of the words “social” and “society”. The other was to talk about determinism and freedom. And as a graduate instructor I have done so. These classes are still my favourite ones after so many years – even now when I am the one who is still asking all the questions.

And I really still am doing just that. Asking questions still and going around in circles and coming out of the same damn door that ‘in I went’. And it’s rather cruelly disappointing in a way. Things could be far worse I know. I know nothing if I don’t know that. But I don’t know what it is that I’m missing while going through the days and nights that have all started looking alike. All I know is that there is something that I’m missing. And since this is not a mystery story - what do I mean by missing? Not looking or seeing carefully enough and therefore overlooking something vital as well as the yawning feeling that something is absent.

Every now and again I have felt as though I were suspended somewhere in-between waiting….the wait comes. Time hangs. For some moments it feels as though there is no movement at all almost as if the utter timelessness within my own senses will be followed by something incomparably magnificent and absolute. But I am a wise fool and I know all that follows is the unbearable sadness and the just about bearable and the quotidian. They come in and swing. The glory is most likely for those who have already paid their dues.
For now I am determined by the dues I must pay and I shall and will.

Tomorrow or the day after there will be some other post - maybe even a funny one...

Last day of Class

Last day of my summer teaching as a graduate instructor was the day before. At the beginning of class, while I was just about to go upstairs to get some coffee for myself, a couple of my students running down the stairs handed me a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin. They walked towards me with the bag and cup in their hands and thrust both out towards me with me looking no doubt a little blank. "Yes. We got it for you. A little going-away gift. Thanks..." I was so touched that all I could say about five times and more was "Thank you so much. That was awfully nice of you..." They seemed equally gleeful and one of the boys informed me "...and we were worrying whether you'd beat us to the cafe." "Yes, so we ran upstairs as fast as we could..." said the other.

And on the same day right at the end of that last class on that last day, I'd barely said a proper good bye to all the students...there were a couple of girls who came up and wanted an A instead of a B for the course. One of them plaintively inquired why she hadn't done well in the last quiz even though both of them had studied together till 3 O'clock the night before the quiz. There were more comments. They wanted me to increase the number of points for their class presentation. They accused me of not having enough assignments (which is why they hadn't done well). And then one of the girls made the mistake of saying, "I didn't know that I'd get a B if I missed 11 points." That was it. I told her that the information was in the syllabus and that I hadn't kept it a secret, and if she had wanted to get an A so badly then maybe she would have done well not to have waited until the very last day of class.

That was that more or less.