The Hungry Tide

Excerpts from The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh

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How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

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Look, I’m alive. On what? Neither childhood nor the future grows less…More being than I’ll ever need springs up in my heart.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies

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Then we heard the settlers shouting a refrain, answering the questions they had themselves posed: 'Morichjhapi chharbona. We'll not leave Morichjhapi, do what you may.'

Standing on the deck of the bhotbhoti, I was struck by the beauty of this. Where else could you belong, except in the place you refused to leave.

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Maybe what's left of us
is some tree on a hillside
we can look at day after day,
and the perverse affection of a habit
that liked us so much it never let go
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies

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Postscript: In the reading of a book, in the transfer of the self from the here to the imaginary, there is a skill that is rare. If I told you, I have this skill, I can disconnect from myself, like pulling a plug out of a socket, and connect into the electricity of this book, watch the tides, the Irawaddy Dolphin, the lines of Fokir's body, the tawny eyes of the Royal Bengal Tiger; if I told you this, you would not understand, you would not see it as a 'value add'. And is it a value add? Does it make me a better person to feel a book, to see it, instead of merely understanding it?

That is probably an irrelevant question. If more being than I'll ever need springs up in my heart, what is that to anyone else? They have their own beings to contend with.

I have constantly to remind myself that I am not unique by virtue of my experiences. Only by what I choose to make of them. Which is nothing much.