And all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity (a line from Homeward Bound)

September 6, 2006 | Filed Under Poetry, Point of View 

You read two hundred pages of a book and you don’t know what’s going on. You leave the book read another and you finish that book. Then you come back to this unfinished book and see if you can read it further. A bit into the book and you realise that the book was written for this one page that you have just read. And it suddenly becomes larger than life. Reading the Quran, Bible, Gita, if one usually opens a random page, you generally get an insight over a problem that has been bothering you.

Sometimes books of lesser men have the same effect. Plagued by the fact that whatever I had been writing off late was nothing but just mediocre and then I come across this page which in a way was therapeutic. (On a separate note, do you know about bibliotherapy?) I highly recommend it for everyone.

So I read this page and then a chapter after that and I had a kind of moment of truth. We put too much pressure on ourselves sometimes, we also do it on others. We expect them to behave in a certain way that we think is right. Babies are conditioned from early age, they are taught to stop mumbling and saying A, B, C, D…. Adults are conditioned about moral values. The parent expects his child to follow certain principles. The government lays down rules and laws. We are constricted in all possible ways. Sometimes we acquire this desire of breaking free from all such thought. While sometimes we live with it cause we are OK. What probably is difficult is break one’s own notion. If one manages to do that, I think one has come far in one’s life.

Philip, the protagonist in William Somerset Maugham’s, “Of Human Bondage”, is asking the same questions that probably I have been asking. You can read the page that i read below and the link to the chapters after:

“No, I won’t do that.”

“Why not?” asked Philip, reddening.

The request was one which they all made of one another, and no one ever thought of refusing. Clutton shrugged his shoulders.

“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. Besides, what’s the good of criticism? What does it matter if your picture is good or bad?”

“It matters to me.”

“No. The only reason that one paints is that one can’t help it. It’s a function like any of the other functions of the body, only comparatively few people have got it. One paints for oneself: otherwise one would commit suicide. Just think of it, you spend God knows how long trying to get something on to canvas, putting the sweat of your soul into it, and what is the result? Ten to one it will be refused at the Salon; if it’s accepted, people glance at it for ten seconds as they pass; if you’re lucky some ignorant fool will buy it and put it on his walls and look at it as little as he looks at his dining-room table. Criticism has nothing to do with the artist. It judges objectively, but the objective doesn’t concern the artist.”

Clutton put his hands over his eyes so that he might concentrate his mind on what he wanted to say.

“The artist gets a peculiar sensation from something he sees, and is impelled to express it and, he doesn’t know why, he can only express his feeling by lines and colours. It’s like a musician; he’ll read a line or two, and a certain combination of notes presents itself to him: he doesn’t know why such and such words call forth in him such and such notes; they just do. And I’ll tell you another reason why criticism is meaningless: a great painter forces the world to see nature as he sees it; but in the next generation another painter sees the world in another way, and then the public judges him not by himself but by his predecessor. So the Barbizon people taught our fathers to look at trees in a certain manner, and when Monet came along and painted differently, people said: But trees aren’t like that. It never struck them that trees are exactly how a painter chooses to see them. We paint from within outwards–if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don’t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don’t attach any meaning to greatness or to smallness. What happens to our work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it.”

u might also want to read the following connected chapters -

http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.1/bookid.642/sec.50/

http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.1/bookid.642/sec.51/

http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.1/bookid.642/sec.52/

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