Anecdotal Evidence

"Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti" said my cousin. And with that I will pause to set up context. I am told interruption is the thing, these days.  I am told that, you dear reader, are not likely to be interested in what I tell you, unless I tell you why I am telling you what I am telling you. I shan't  - been a while since I said that (which is smugger than last season’s 'always wanted to say that') – protest, saying the context is invariably such a flimsy apology. You know that. And a concise explanation of context does not do justice to my usually cosmic intent. Now, having anti-sold well enough, I will appear to yield. One of the many reasons why I liked Manu Joseph's 'The Illict Happiness of Other People ' is the depiction of the anguish of the weak and not-so-smart Thoma, who desires, among other things, appreciation. He nurses the ambition of being a writer, but is terrified by the problem that 'even writers need to know facts...

The vital law governing Hindu poetics is that it does not seek to represent life and character primarily or for their own sake; its aim is fundamentally aesthetic: by the delicate and harmonious rendering to awaken the aesthetic sense of the onlooker and gratify it by moving and subtly observed pictures of human feeling; it did not attempt to seize a man's spirit by the hair and drag it out into a storm of horror and pity and fear and return it to him drenched, beaten and shuddering. ..... Certainly poetry was regarded as a force for elevation as well as for charm, but as it reaches these objects through aesthetic beauty, aesthetic gratification must be the whole basis of dramatic composition, all other super-structural objects are secondary. The Hindu mind therefore shrank not only from violence, horror and physical tragedy, the Elizabethan stock-in-trade, but even from the tragic in moral problems which attracted the Greek mind; still less could it have consented to occupy its...