Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Practice

"In the end, the problem is not so much that people forget, but that they do not always forget the same thing. What still exists as a memory for one person can be irretrievably lost for another, and this creates difficulties, insuperable barriers against understanding."
I am reading a Paul Auster book about a city where everything is being seen for one last time before they disappear from both the mind and the world.
Yesterday I did an English translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya's Bengali short story 'Cold Fire' for our Sanglap July 2015 Supplement on Nabarun Bhattacharya.
Today I found myself wandering through the Rookwood necropolis. It's always a curious feeling to walk on a ground with bodies underneath it. A graveyard walker is a rare vertical trace of movement in an immovably horizontal world. I was gearing up for this graveyard Sunday for a while though. As one of Beckett's characters says in a short story, the dead are much more interesting company than the living.
The book I am reading, the story I translated and the day I lived through the Shakespearean 'rooky wood'---they are all permeated with a dying I can see, the death of which I am never going to see!

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