For critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Proust’s involuntary memory is not based neither on one’s experiences nor the cues that trigger such involuntary memory. Instead, Proust’s involuntary memory is much closer to the act of forgetting.[2]
Benjamin also maintains that Proust’s asthma contributed to his long, windy sentences:
Proust’s syntax rhythmically, step by step, enacts his fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, didactic reflections invariably are the deep breath with which he shakes off the crushing weight of memories.[3]
Victor E. Graham (1965):
One of the fundamental aspects of Proust’s style is his use of metaphor or images. He believed that beauty or truth can only be expressed obliquely and this is why he used clusters of images or strings of morphemes to focus on the truth by a sort of stylistic convergence….[4]
Robert Soucey (1967):
Proust felt strongly, however, that books should not be approached as if they provided definitive answers to all life’s questions, as if they were Holy Writ….[5]
Proust believed that reading as a spur to day-dreaming was one of literature’s most vital functions….[6]
There is no glorification of speed-reading in Proust; for one thing, it would allow no time for day-dreaming….[7]
Proust suggests that good reading rather than being an escape from reality is a means of experiencing it more fully, a means of sharpening one’s intellectual and emotional awareness of life. In this, the act of reading is not unlike the act of creating. [8]
Because my bookclub is reading Proust this month, I thought I would start posting some portions of my notes. Let’s start with what other artists and critics have had to say:
For every man, and from the same materials, several ‘personalities’ are possible. Sometimes coexisting, more or less equally.––Sometimes a childish personality re-emerges during one’s forties. You think you’re the same. There is no same.
We believe that we might, from childhood, have become a different person, lived a different life––We picture ourself being quite different. But the possibility of re-grouping the same elements in several different ways still remains––this calls into question how we see time. There’s no lost, past time, as long as these other persons are possible.[1]
J. Murray in 1926:
What Proust aims at is a mental reconstruction of his past. He tries to recapture all the forgotten sensations that constitute his past life. In this ‘novel of memory,’ as his work has been called, the greatest innovation is Proust’s conception of memory itself. He maintains that, in reconstituting the past, it is not conscious memory but involuntary memory that is the most important factor. It is not the things we have always remembered of the past that keep the past alive in us, it is the things which, having been completely forgotten, are recalled in all their original vividness by some trivial sensation, and not by an act of the intelligence at all….[2]
If we can only recapture the past by recapturing the actual sensation belonging to it, Proust concludes that our past joys and griefs are not always in our possession. But if by any chance we are brought into contact with the whole framework of sensations in which our past joys and sorrows are stored away, then these past sensations can again exercise a great power over us, because for the time being they instal [sic.] within us, as it were, the being we were at the time when they first affected us….[3]
Proust reduces love at most to a mere series of ‘intermittences’ of the heart. He regards it as something relative, and denies its existence as an absolute reality. It is only because we are forgetful or ignorant of the extent to which we are creatures of change that the illusion of love is possible. [4]
I find myself in a world so natural, so complete, that I am lost. I have the sensation of being immersed in the very plexus of life, focal from whatever place, position or attitude I take my stance. Lost as when once I sank into the quick of a budding grove and seated in the dining room of that enormous world of Balbec, I caught for the first time the profound meaning of those interior stills which manifest their presence through the exorcism of sight and touch. Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created I re-experienced the power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art. [5]
Is Michel Houellebecq’s Sounmission (Submission) (2015) merely a re-writing of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934)? Do these mannish novels, separated by nearly ninety years, bear any family resemblances? One can say, at the very least, that while Miller turned to surrealism in order to cope with the pains of his reality, Houellebecq opted for satire to understand the surrealism plaguing his reality.
One of the theses of Houellebecq’s narrator is the fact that modern citizens of Western civilization don’t fear death—they fear suffering:
People don’t really care all that much about their own death. What they really worry about, their one real fixation, is how to avoid physical suffering as much as possible. [2]
To condition the mind to cope with death, Westerners have resorted to, among other things, music, drugs, sex, and religion. And, most of the time, as Miller’s narrator observes, none of these actions or options remains satisfactory:
Impossible to dream even when the music itself is nothing but a dream…. There is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.[3]
The “illusion of truth†inhibits one from encountering the truth.[4] The illusion of truth inhibits all experience. This idea is further explored in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a.k.a. Blade Runner (1968):
Out in what had been before the war the suburbs, one could find buildings entirely empty … or so he had heard. He had let the information remain secondhand; like most people he did not care to experience it directly.[5]
Is it too absolute, too definite, to suggest that doubt is the midpoint between dream and experience?
Much of Dick’s Electric Sheep is a rewriting of Huxley’s Brave New World (1931). In fact, Dick’s fiction has been conditioned by Huxley’s. From the latter:
It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge…. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.†[6]
Oh untimely death![7]Oh inescapable conditioning! With Houellebecq the narrator’s conversion to Islam serves as the medium of his conditioning. In Dick’s book the profession of the character of Rick is that of a bounty hunter, and this––as well as the possibility that Rick may be an android implanted with false memories of being a bounty hunter––has conditioned him to prefer avoiding direct experience. In Huxley the soma pills inhibit the experiences had by the novel’s characters, which is why they sing things like: “hug me till you drug me, honey.†And in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry (1927), the conditioning comes via the American brand of evangelical Christianity. It is a brand that strives to bring happiness to the sick rather than healing, but this happiness is just another “illusion of truth†that inhibits experience:
“Can you think of anything finer for a big husky like you than to spend his life bringing poor, weak, sick, scared folks to happiness? Can’t you see how the poor little skinny guys and all the kiddies would follow you and praise you and admire you, you old son of a gun?â€
And in a later passage from Lewis:
It was not her eloquence but her healing of the sick which raised Sharon to such eminence that she promised to become the most renowned evangelist in America. People were tired of eloquence; and the whole evangelist business was limited, since even the most ardent were not likely to be saved more than three or four times. But they could be healed constantly, and of the same disease.[8]
Huxley, Houellebecq, and Lewis all use satire to tell their tales, while Dick and Miller, whose texts are not without their moments of comic relief, are for the most part, utterly serious with their styles of storytelling.
NOTES
[1] Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1931. NY: Harper Collins – First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition. 2006. XIII, p. 193.
[2] Houellebecq, Michel. Sounmission. (Submission.) Translated by Lorin Stein. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2015. p. 230.
[3] Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. 1934. NY: Grove Press. 1961. pp.70, 87–88.
[4] I suspect Miller’s “illusion of truth†is akin to Nietzsche’s “seduction of language,†(Genealogy I, 13).
[5] Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968. NY: Delrey Books. 2007. I, 3.
Misreading & Mistranslating: between Boredom & Bombast
The books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying, that we have come up with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on.
“You don’t impress me at all,†she said, “Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn’t make it true. What I really think, sir––why do you always call me dear Fräulein?––is that you can’t be bothered with the truth simply because it’s too tiring.â€
Reading Theory I: Somewhere in After Babel (1975) George Steiner writes that there is no such thing as proper translation—there are only mistranslations (some better than others), and that creative mistranslation is the job of the interpretant.
Reading Practice I: A few weeks ago in Al Cantion, a seafood restaurant in Comacchio, northeast Italy––with the icon of Sophia Loren centered high on one of the walls, beaming, bearing down on all the restaurant’s patrons––I, Bookbread, and my company Cosimo and Chiara and Scott were eating some delicious seafood when someone at our table mentioned the name Alessandro Manzoni in passing.
Because Bookbread cannot tell a lie under Sophia’s watchful eye, I confessed to my company that I Promessi sposi (Betrothed) (1827) was, for me, a boring read, hadn’t been that bored reading since a tenth grade assignment covering Pushkin’sThe Captain’s Daughter (1836).
But Italian natives Cosimo and Chiara (both university educated, the former from the rustic south, the latter from urban Rome) thought Manzoni boring also, and couldn’t understand why he continues to be so revered by educators of Italian Literature, when even the Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (2003) informs us:
I promessi sposi was a required text in schools. Up to a generation or so ago, it was not unusual to find Italians able to recite from memory long passages from the most famous pages of the novel.[5]
Bookbread remembered to thank Sophia how Manzoni could, occasionally, offer moments of slight self-depreciation in a tongue-in-cheek style:
The reader should know that among the common people in Milan, and even more in the country, the word ‘poet’ does not mean what it means among all respectable folk—a sacred genius, an inhabitant of Pindus, a votary of the Muses: it means a peculiar person who’s a bit crazy, and talks and behaves with more wit and oddity than sense. What an impertinent habit this is of the common people’s manhandling words and making them say things so very far from their legitimate meaning! For what, I ask you, has writing poetry got to do with being a bit crazy?[6]
Reading Theory II: Somewhere in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) Harold Bloom writes that there is no such thing as properly reading a poem––there are only misreadings (some better than others), and that creative misreading is the job of the literary critic.
Reading Practice II: A week after Comacchio, in the shadow of the Texas Capitol, a fellow writer and brother-in-law of Bookbread’s called Brick Made, invited me to the Chili Parlor because he was curious about Bookbread’s recent trip to Italia.
Memories of Bookbread’s visit through Emilia-Romagna were soon imparted to Brick Made. Later in the conversation I mentioned, without hesitation or criticism, that Bookbread didn’t understand Brick Made’s latest published short story about baseball. Ten years ago, when face to face with a writer, Bookbread would have told that person, “I liked it†whatever it was I just read of theirs, whether I truly did or not. Now too much truth spills out, and I think I’ve made a mess at the chili parlor.
“Oh, there’s nothing to get,†says Brick Made. “It was literary clickbait, an exercise in the gonzo-esque, trolling for what counts as trendy.â€
“Well, trolling can be good. The random can be good. The story was really random. Bateson says somewhere that ‘without the random, there can be no new thing.’ â€[7]
“Yea, I carpet-bombed them with Dadaism. I wrote it to purposely make no sense—as randomly as possible––that’s what the mag wanted.â€
“Benevolent blitzkrieg. But we’re in election season, so perhaps it’s appropriate.â€
“Egg and face and all that. But they paid me. And published me. So I’m happy. Joke’s on them.â€
(Another example of trolling the trendy: Edward Snowden/Scissorhands on CNN )
NOTES
[1] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar: Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 31, 1837.â€
[2] Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: or, Life in the Woods. Boston, MA: Ticknor & Fields. 1854. “Economy.â€
[3] Kraus, Karl. Half–truths& one–and–a–halftruths: selected aphorisms. Edited and Translated by Harry Zohn. Engendra Press: Montreal. Reprint Chicago UP. 1976. p. 52.
[4] Kafka, Franz. “Beschreibung Eines Kampfes.†(“Description of a Struggle.â€) Translated by Tania and James Stern. Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. NY: Schocken. 1971. p. 37.
[5] Ragusa, Olga. “Alessandro Manzoni and developments in the historical novel.†The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel. Eds. Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli. Cambridge UP. 2003. p. 43.
[6] Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi Sposi. (Betrothed.) 1840. Translated by Fr Kenelm Foster. 1964. Edited by David Forgacs and Matthew Reynolds. London, UK: J. M. Dent. 1997. XIV, pp. 204–05.
[7] Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature. NY: E. P. Dutton. 1979. p. 147.
“If American Jews and Israel Are Drifting Apart, What’s the Reason?” by Elliot Abrams. Mosaic Magazine.
“Language Leakage: An Interview with Sarah Thomason: the linguist discusses how technology shapes culture and culture shapes words.” by Ryan Bradley. The Paris Review.
“Vanishing Languages, Reincarnated as Music.” by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim. Â New York Times.
“Nights of Terror, Days of Weird: [Review of Yours in Haste and Adoration: Selected Letters of Terry Southern.” by Will Stephenson. Oxford American.
One of my favorite bloggers, Biblioklept, has written a terrific reflection on the life and work of Gary Shandling. I must be about the same age as Biblioklept, because this too was my experience:
I grew up with Garry Shandling on TV—weird, enigmatic even—dry, sure—watching him when I was too young to get what he was doing. But he stuck out more than others to me when I’d watch Carson late at night with my grandmother. And then watching It’s Garry Shandling’s Show on Fox sometimes, with my parents: it was like Newhart (and Bob Newhart’s stuff in general)—I didn’t quite get it (yet), but I wanted to get it. It wasn’t dumb—and when it was dumb, it was dumb in a smart way.
“No audience is without its idiosyncrasies of belief.â€
––Midnight’s Children, “Under the Carpet”
There were lots of things I didn’t understand about Midnight’s Children, but fairly early on, I started to see a four-way “game†emerge between me the reader, Rushdie the writer, the book’s narrator Saleem Sinai who is also a writer, and his wife Padma as another reader.
I’ve never read anything by Rushdie before, but I’ve seen some interviews. He comes off as very charming, handsome, witty, has a crisp Oxford accent, and is apparently quite the lady’s man.
Certainly there is some of Rushdie the writer in his character of the narrator-writer Saleem Sinai. And as a reader I certainly felt some impatience, early on, with the story, as does Saleem’s wife Padma Mangroli:
While I, at my desk, feel the sting of Padma’s impatience. (I wish, at times, for a more discerning audience, someone who would understand the need for rhythm, pacing, the subtle introduction of minor chords which will later rise, swell, seize the melody.) (“Methwold†112)
And in a later passage we learn from Saleem:
I am, in fact, entirely content with the uncomplaining thews of Padma Mangroli, who is, unaccountably, more interested in me than my tales. (“Revelations†310)
So Padma is more interested in the writer than his writings, and I think that Rushdie, as a writer and a celebrity, has experienced that often enough: people would rather meet him than read his work. After all:
In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe. (“Revelations†310)
Also, in terms of this story’s setting, India and Pakistan were then (and still are) very patriarchal places. I would almost argue that in Midnight’s Children the narrator treats the reader as he would a wife in that part of the world: I the reader am subordinate to Rushdie the writer (I can’t change the way he wrote the story or edit what he wrote about); and Padma remains the subordinate intimate of Saleem. She is also his caretaker, as readers are the caretakers of writers.
Overall, Rushdie’s style seems heavily influenced by Conrad and Faulkner, his vast vocabulary by Joyce. Rushdie the writer and his narrator Saleem the writer seem much more comfortable in their profession than the narrator-writer in Roth’s American Pastoral, who grumbles:
Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn’t completely wreck your life. (“Chapter 3” 63)
Rushdie and Saleem are, furthermore, way more confident in their abilities to put pen to paper than both the narrator-writer in Roth’s American Pastoral as well as in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair:
It’s a discouraging thing, sir. The more you succeed the more glad they are to see the last of you. (II, viii, 68)
NOTES
Greene Graham. The End of the Affair. 1951. NY: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. 1977.
Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. NY: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1997. Vintage International Edition. 1998.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. NY: Knopf. 1981. NY: Random House Paperbacks. 2006.
After reading from the Dublin Review of Books, I conclude: I’ve always thought Chesterton was a tad overrated in the sense that he’s better in small sips rather than long binges, but I never heard about the anti-Semitism angle before. Leave it to the prolongedly persecuted Irish to point this out!
These are all taken from either the Oxford English Dictionary or Wikipedia. I will say that Rushdie’s novel has been the most vocabulary-challenging novel I’ve read since Joyce’s Ulysses.
almirah: (Bengali) a free-standing cupboard, wardrobe, or other storage unit: (also) a chest of drawers.
ayah:Â (Portuguese) a native-born nurse or maidservant, employed esp. by Europeans in India and other parts of South Asia.
badmaash: (Urdu) A scoundrel, a rogue; a miscreant; a hooligan, a ruffian.
bajra: The name in Indian vernaculars of various kinds of grain (e.g. Penicillaria spicata, Panicum vulgare) extensively grown in India.
bhel-puri: (Hindi)Â In Indian cookery: a dish or snack typically consisting of puffed rice, onions, potatoes, and spicy and sweet chutneys, sometimes served on a puri.
birianis: (Hindi) Biryani, sometimes spelled biriyani or biriani, is a mixed rice dish from the Indian subcontinent. It is made with spices, rice and meat or vegetables.
brinjal: The Anglo-Indian name of the fruit of the Egg-plant ( Solanum melongena).
 chaprassi: doorkeeper, messenger.
 charpoy: (Urdu) the common light Indian bedstead.
 chatterjees: person who talks a lot, gossip.
 chavanni: (Hindi) a unit of currency:
1 Rupee = 100 Paisa
1 Rupee = 16 Anna and 4 Paisa (in old calculation)
1 Anna = 6 Paisa
Chavanni = 4 anna = 24 paisa
chawl: (Marathi, Sanskrit)Â an Indian lodging-house.
 chutney: A strong hot relish or condiment compounded of ripe fruits, acids, or sour herbs, and flavoured with chillies, spices, etc.
 cheroot: (FR) a cigar made in Southern India or Manilla. This sort being truncated at both ends, the name was extended to all cigars with the two extremities cut off square, as distinguished from the ordinary cigar, which has one end pointed.
coir: (Mayalam) the prepared fibre of the husk of the coco-nut, used for making ropes, cordage, matting, etc. Originally, the thread or cordage made of this fibre.
crorepatis: both of Indian and Pakistani language of Millionaire. Crorepati a person who resides in a household whose net worth or wealth exceeds ten million rupees, or units of another currency.
dhow: a native vessel used on the Arabian Sea, generally with a single mast, and of 150 to 200 tons burden; but the name is somewhat widely applied to all Arab vessels, and has become especially well known in connection with the slave trade on the East coast of Africa.
djellabeh: clothing similar to a kaftan.
djinn: also romanized as djinn or anglicized as genies, are supernatural creatures in early Arabian and later Islamic mythology and theology. An individual member of the jinn is known as a jinni, djinni, or genie (الجني, al-jinnī).
dugdugee: some kind of drum.
dupatta: (Hindi) A doubled or two-layered length of cloth worn by women as a scarf, veil, or shoulder wrap.
 Eid-ul-Fitr: Eid al-Fitr (Arabic: عيد الÙطر‎ ʻĪd al-Fiá¹r, IPA: [Ê•iËd al fitˤr], “festival of breaking of the fast”), also called Breaking the Fast Feast, the Sugar Feast, Bayram (Bajram), the Sweet Festival or Hari Raya Puasa[3] and the Lesser Eid, is an important religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide that marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting (sawm). The religious Eid is a single day during which Muslims are not permitted to fast. The holiday celebrates the conclusion of the 29 or 30 days of dawn-to-sunset fasting during the entire month of Ramadan. The day of Eid, therefore, falls on the first day of the month of Shawwal. The date for the start of any lunar Hijri month varies based on the observation of new moon by local religious authorities, so the exact day of celebration varies by locality. However, in most countries, it is generally celebrated on the same day as Saudi Arabia.
 fissiparous: Of organisms: producing new individuals by fission.
 forfend: To forbid, prohibit. With the thing forbidden as object, or with personal object and an inf. with to as second object. Obs.
fustian: (OF) Formerly, a kind of coarse cloth made of cotton and flax. Now, a thick, twilled, cotton cloth with a short pile or nap, usually dyed of an olive, leaden, or other dark colour.
godown: (Italian, Malaysian)Â A warehouse or other place for storing goods.
goondas: (Hindi) rascals, goons.
gram (food): the chick-pea, a kind of vetch, Cicer arietinum. Sometimes called Bengal gram. The name is extended to any kind of pulse used as food for horses.
goitred (adj): affected with, of the nature of, or pertaining to, goitre. Of a locality: Characterized by the prevalence of goitre.
hamal: (Arabic) a Turkish or Oriental porter; in Western India, a palanquin-bearer.
hortal: (Latin) growing in a garden; cultivated.
houris: A nymph of the Muslim Paradise. Hence applied allusively to a voluptuously beautiful woman.
janum: some kind of title, or either respect or affection.
 jawan: (Urdu) An Indian soldier.
 jowar: Indian millet, Sorghum vulgare, extensively cultivated in India. Also attrib.
kachcha: (Hindi-English) crude, imperfect, or temporary.
khichri: (Hindi) (kedgeree)Â An Indian dish of rice boiled with split pulse, onions, eggs, butter, and condiments; also, in European cookery, a dish made of cold fish, boiled rice, eggs, and condiments, served hot. Also transf. and fig.
kofta: (Hindi) meatball; a rissole, made of meat or fish, popular in the East.
kurta: (Hindi)Â A loose shirt or tunic worn by men and women.
laddoo: (Hindi) A type of Indian sweetmeat, usu. made from a dough of flour, sugar, shortening, etc., which is fried and then shaped into balls; a ball of this. Cf. jalebi n.
maulvi: (Urdu) A Muslim doctor of the law; an imam. Also gen. (esp. in South Asia): a teacher of Arabic, a learned man. Also as a title and form of address.
mehndi: (SK) chiefly in South Asia: the henna plant, Lawsonia inermis, often used as hedging; (also) a preparation of this, used to dye skin and hair.
mildewing: to affect or taint with mildew.
muezzin: (Arabic) Islam. A public crier who proclaims the regular hours of ritual prayer from the minaret or the roof of a mosque.
nakkoo: Person with an outsized nose or curiosity, a Nosey-Parker.
nawab: In South Asia: a Muslim official who acted as a deputy ruler or viceroy of a province or district under the Mughal empire (now hist.); any governor of a town or district, or person of high status. Also: the title of such a person.
nictate: (Latin) to wink or blink; (also) to act as a nictitating membrane.
olfactory: (Latin) a thing to be smelled.
 outre: Beyond the bounds of what is usual or considered correct and proper; unusual, peculiar; eccentric, unorthodox; extreme.
paan: (Hindi) a preparation of betel leaves chewed as a stimulant; spec. a mixture of chopped areca nut, slaked lime, and other ingredients wrapped in a betel leaf.
pakoras: (Hindi) An appetizer or snack made from pieces of chopped vegetable or other foodstuff that have been coated in seasoned batter and deep-fried.
parathas: In South Asia and in South Asian communities elsewhere: a type of unleavened bread fried on a griddle in butter or ghee, and sometimes served with a filling.
pean: A fur resembling ermine but having gold markings on a black field. Also as adj.
piebald: Chiefly derogatory. Composed of differing or incongruous parts; motley, mixed.
 piscine: (MF) a pond, a pool, esp. one for swimming or bathing.
plimsoll: Naut. attrib. and in the genitive. Chiefly with capital initial. Designating a marking or series of markings on the side of a merchant ship which indicates, in British maritime law, the draught level to which the ship may be loaded with cargo (now consisting of a set of six such marks applying to different sea conditions); esp.
prehensile: capable of prehension; (Zool., of a tail, limb, etc.) capable of grasping or holding.
pomfret: (PG) Any of several Indo-Pacific butterfishes of the genus Pampus (family Stromateidae). Freq. with distinguishing adjective.
purdah: (Urdu) orig. and chiefly S. Asian. A curtain; esp. one used in some Muslim and Hindu communities to screen women from public observation and particularly from the sight of men or strangers. Now freq. in extended use.
(Rite of) Puja: PÅ«jÄ or Poojan is a prayer ritual performed by Hindus to host, honour and worship one or more deities, or to spiritually celebrate an event.[1][2] Sometimes spelt phonetically as pooja or poojah, it may honour or celebrate the presence of special guest(s), or their memories after they pass away. The word pÅ«jÄ (Devanagari: पूजा) comes from Sanskrit, and means reverence, honour, homage, adoration, and worship.[3] Puja rituals are also held by Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs.
In Hinduism, puja is done on a variety of occasions, frequency and settings. It may include daily puja done in the home, to occasional temple ceremonies and annual festivals, to few lifetime events such as birth of a baby or a wedding, or to begin a new venture.[4] The two main areas where puja is performed are in the home and at temples to mark certain stages of life, events or some festivals such as Durga Puja and Lakshmi Puja.[5] Puja is not mandatory; it may be a routine daily affair for some Hindus, periodic ritual for some, and infrequent for other Hindus. In some temples, various pujas may be performed daily at various times of the day; in other temples, it may be occasional.[6][7]
ragi: Finger millet ( Eleusine coracana) as grown as a food crop in India, where it is typically ground into flour and eaten as bread or as a kind of paste.
ravelin: (MF) fortification. A detached outwork, constructed beyond the main ditch and in front of the curtain, and consisting of two faces forming a salient angle. Cf. redan n. 1a. Now hist.
rowlatt: The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919 popularly known as the Rowlatt Act was a legislative act passed by the Imperial Legislative Council in Delhi on March 18, 1919, indefinitely extending the emergency measures of preventive indefinite detention, incarceration without trial and judicial review enacted in the Defence of India Act 1915 during the First World War.
sadhu: (SK) In India: a holy man, a sage.
sahib: (Urdu) A respectful title used by an Indian in addressing an Englishman or other European (= ‘Sir’); an Englishman, a European. Also affixed as a title (equivalent to ‘Mr.’) to the name or office of a European and to Indian and Bangladeshi titles and names.
 shatranj: Shatranj, is an old form of chess, which came to the Western world by the Persians and later Greeks, and ultimately from India via the Persian Empire. Modern chess gradually developed from this game.
shikara: (Hindi)Â A long, swift boat used in Kashmir. Also attrib.
sisal: Used attrib. with sisal fibre, sisal grass, sisal hemp, to designate the prepared fibre of several species of Agave and Fourcroya, which is largely exported Yucatan for use in rope-making. Also sisal plant, the aloe or other plant from which the fibre is obtained.
tamasha: (Arabic, Urdu) an entertainment, show, display, public function.
What’s not to like about Martin Buber? Walter Benjamin, Walter Kaufmann, Gershom Scholem, Franz Kafka, Leo Strauss et al answer that question in Benjamin Ivery’s interview with Dominique Bourel in The Forward:
Buber is often between two fields. He writes too well to be a philosopher, and that unsettled people.
