I don’t need music, lobster or wine
Whenever your eyes look into mine;
The things I long for are simple and few:
A cup of coffee, a sandwich-and you!
An American author called Billy Rose said that.
It’s been a very hectic week, and I know just what he means.
I have had no time to think or listen to music or open that wine, so I have a very, very short blog post this week, about a very simple pleasure in life.
Whenever I have a week like this, I survive on sandwiches for breakfast.
This is not normal. I usually have two breakfasts, one at 8:30 am, or thereabouts, and another at 10.30 or 11 am.
Hey, I get hungry.
Anyway, back to the sandwiches.
You can create the most magnificent breakfasts from two slices of bread - and a few things in between.
You know what they say? Life is like a sandwich; the more you add to it, the better it becomes.
Here’s what I had yesterday.
* Two slices of dalia (that’s cracked wheat, I think; we get it in the neighbourhood) bread, lightly toasted
* Mustard - sometimes it’s a local mustard, sometimes a grainy French mustard
* Big leaf of lettuce
* Big leaf of spinach
* Chopped olives
* A slice of ham
* Some thin slices of cheese (I usually use a cheese with cumin gouda, called Flanders, made on a farm somewhere on the outskirsts of Delhi)
* A double-fried egg (no runny yolk)
It’s so simple.
Put it together, and my god, there can be no better breakfast.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Horrors of the mind
Are books meant to make us feel good? Are they meant to make us cheerful? I don’t think so. Not always.
Books are meant to make us feel awed and humbled. The pleasure they provide – the pleasure of the mind, the joy of seeing worlds created by words – is undimmed even if they are about catastrophic subjects, even if they are nihilistic in their approach or end in tragedy or are untouched by redemption.
Is Anna Karenina a very happy novel? Is Madame Bovary? Are the novels by Richard Yates?
I thought of all this again on reading in one breathless sitting the great American writer William Styron’s memoir of madness. Read the New York Times review here.
In the 1980s, Styron suffered from clinical depression. It was a debilitating malaise that turned him into a wretched, broken, suicidal man.
“Depression,” Styron tells us in the opening pages of this slim, harrowing book, “is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self – to the mediating intellect – as to verge close to being beyond description.”
He does a remarkable job of putting into words the ineffable, of showing how the “gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain”: the slow disintegration of the mind, the parallel shutting down of the body, the medication, the tendencies of self-destruction, the unremitting gloom.
In the end, Styron – a peer of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal – did emerge from his depression. But this memoir remained his last major book, an afterword, as Karl Miller wrote in the London Review of Books, to “his novels, with their stress on suicide and gloom”.
Books are meant to make us feel awed and humbled. The pleasure they provide – the pleasure of the mind, the joy of seeing worlds created by words – is undimmed even if they are about catastrophic subjects, even if they are nihilistic in their approach or end in tragedy or are untouched by redemption.
Is Anna Karenina a very happy novel? Is Madame Bovary? Are the novels by Richard Yates?
I thought of all this again on reading in one breathless sitting the great American writer William Styron’s memoir of madness. Read the New York Times review here.
In the 1980s, Styron suffered from clinical depression. It was a debilitating malaise that turned him into a wretched, broken, suicidal man.
“Depression,” Styron tells us in the opening pages of this slim, harrowing book, “is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self – to the mediating intellect – as to verge close to being beyond description.”
He does a remarkable job of putting into words the ineffable, of showing how the “gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain”: the slow disintegration of the mind, the parallel shutting down of the body, the medication, the tendencies of self-destruction, the unremitting gloom.
In the end, Styron – a peer of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal – did emerge from his depression. But this memoir remained his last major book, an afterword, as Karl Miller wrote in the London Review of Books, to “his novels, with their stress on suicide and gloom”.
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