For my 401st post, I give you "inspiration" from a new sign I saw in the bazaar yesterday:

An infinity of forests lies dormant in the dreams of one acorn.

Hmm. I am an acorn. I am a sapling? I have dreams? Or is this about reforestation? If so, then we definitely need to get out of the dreaming phase and into the actual planting.

light and shadow:

Our Short Stories & Supper group kicked off a new season this week with a Maupassant piece chosen by a French colleague.

I couldn't take off my history teacher lens, so it read like a typical 19th century critique of bourgeois manners and values. The story recounts a conversation between a grandmother and granddaughter in the years after the Revolution. The young girl (brainwashed by middle-class Society) longs for one grand passion/love that will lead to marriage. The grandmother longs for her youth, when people were smart enough to follow passion/love wherever it led. She warns her granddaughter of the unhappiness that waits for those who expect love and marriage to coincide.

Frankly, our discussion proved more interesting than the story. It's amazing how a group of people can read the same words and come away with wildly opposing interpretations. The one married couple present found the young girl's sweetness and innocent belief in love charming and, yes, true. But several of us agreed that Maupassant wrote the story as a sermon championing the grandmother's viewpoint: Maupassant thought his young girl utterly foolish, and marriage a farce.

We have met five or six times now, as a group, and the discussion has been quite free. This time, however, it felt a little stilted. Perhaps we are afraid to voice our views on love in public. It's a tender topic. Our culture has trained us well, both to hope for the kind of passion that ignites a movie soundtrack, and to scoff at the notion that any such passion exists.

I figure out what I think a day or two after these short story discussions, when incoherent fragments in my brain finally come together. What bothers me about Maupassant is that he doesn't see the foolishness of the grandmother's (and his own?) views. Yes, the young girl is naive and perhaps setting herself up for pain, when she tosses aside the instinct to follow attraction wherever it appears. The grandmother, though, acts just as foolishly when she tosses aside the concept of commitment.

Here's the paradox I see in the marriages I admire: The security of a commitment is what allows a passion to burn beyond its initial, thrilling sparks. When people decide to love, they feel free to burn. So, believing in committing to love may bring pain, yes. But believing in following passion for its own sake may, strangely, make depth and freedom of passion impossible.

The whole picture comes down to a question of self and selflessness. If passion and love are all about me and about a feeling, then why should I not pursue any and every attraction? Find pleasure where I can, and so gratify myself. If passion and love are about mutual discovery, and about creating some mysterious unity of identity, then the idea of chasing a whim becomes inconceivable--the only reason the love came into being is because of this particular person. The passion is for this irreplaceable person, not for passion itself, or to please me.

I John says that we know what love is because Jesus laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for others. I believe this. Love is to seek the Other's highest good. The essence of all true loves--not just the romantic ones--has to be a surrender of self; a total giving, without any reserve. It's a way of life that naturally implies both commitment and pain. And, naturally, we shy away from both commitment and pain. But the more we attempt to protect ourselves, the more we eliminate the possibility of meaningful bonds with others.

Now if I only knew how to put this into practice better...

So, in honor of Valentine's Day, our Science Department challenged us to write five-line poems to honor any chemical bond.

Here's my attempt, based on vague memories of electron clouds and shells:


On Surrendering an Electron

Ground flies, entering a cloud.
Forces slam, speak without sound.
Can't tell if I've lost or found,
When this core keeps spinning me round.
Losing my shell: I flounder.

Taxi Driver Truths That May (or may not) Be Quite True:

(learned from Bunty on the way to Dehra Dun and back--he's the one who added the authoritatively delivered caveat that these "may be quite true")

1. Man has three best friends, and in this order: First, the Dog; second, the Horse; third, the Elephant. These are the friends of man. I asked about camels, and was told that camels do not make friends. Man also has one enemy: the Bull. If you wrong a bull, he will remember. When he gets the chance, he will take his revenge.

2. Valentine's Day is actually celebrated for an entire week, everywhere in the world. There's a Rose Day and a Propose Day and a Kiss Day, and as so on....When my French co-worker tried to protest that Valentine's Day really only lasts a day in France, Bunty interrupted her with, "No, everywhere in the whole world, Valentine's Day is a week. I learned this."

3. On Shiv Ratri, the festival honoring the marriage of the god Shiva to Parvati, for one day only, marijuana is legal in India. People drink it in thandai (a marijuana smoothie). They also make marijuana pakoras, sort of like hush puppies. Bunty swears this is the most potent way to take marijuana: "You feel like you're tasting the drugs on the inside of your throat." I don't really know what that means, but it seemed like interesting information.

4. When a Tibetan dies, the family calls in a lama. He reads from a secret book and gives them instructions. Sometimes, they are to "sun" the body and just put it outside, high on a ledge. Other times, they are instructed to eat the body. In these cases, the body is cut up into little pieces and each family member is given equal portions. Gruesome. Also untrue.

5. This one was interesting, coming from an Indian: if Hindu fundamentalist groups would like to see fewer low-caste Hindus becoming Christians or Buddhists, then upper-caste Hindus should stop treating them like animals and give them some rights.

Bunty is a veritable encyclopedia of useful information...