Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Vanaprastha

I am so tired today. Can one get tired just by going on living? This is what is happening with me. Life itself feels like doing work. I was also thinking about the four asharma prescription of Hinduism. I realized that even after spending so much time on this earth I am still in the first ashram! Three more to go!! Granted, I am late by two years for jumping into the second, but still so much of life is left. Do I have enough energy left to go on? I don't think so. The only recourse I think is to jump directly to Vanaprastha. (I have got some renewed impetus in this direction after reading (parts of) Wittgenstein's biography. What a great man! He now joins Kafka, Proust and Kierkegaard to be one of my intellectual heroes!)

I am just too tired today. I have been feeling very stupid and very bored the whole day. When did this whole business of lending and borrowing money got so complicated? I think all those wise Greeks, Thomas Aquinas, medieval Islamic thinkers and Dante, all of them were right. Usury is really a sin! It should be outlawed, may be there will be some hope for this modern world then.

3 comments:

Kubla Khan said...

life does not live, wrote someone. getting tired, a malaise is the actual condition of life. we forget this usually, that is how and why we live.
then we fret and fume, and read and write and watch and seek reasons to read and write and watch.
i think we must remind ourselves of the deterioration process more often than not.
more the loser, extinction, frost, correction.
yet, we cannot sustain a mood for long. hence, we, human.yet life will go on.
everything passes.

Alok said...

yes, but some people have so much energy and life inside them, it never seems to diminish. I wonder where that comes from.

Anonymous said...

i wonder that too.