Consisting of 18 books, or parvas, this story revolves around the conflict between two factions of cousins, the Kauravas and Pandavas, for the throne of Hastinapura. It includes the famous Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu scripture and a philosophical conversation between Prince Arjuna and Lord Krishna. The epic explores various themes such as duty, righteousness, family, war, and the nature of reality. It contains many notable characters: Krishna, Arjuna, Yudhishthira, Bhima, Nakula, Sahadeva, Draupadi, Duryodhana, and Karna. Known for its narrative, the moral, and philosophical dilemmas presented; it has a profound influence on Indian culture, literature, and religious beliefs.
The daughter of the river was named Girika and the king made her his wife. Once, the time for intercourse arrived and Vasu’s wife, Girika, having purified herself by bathing at the fertile time, informed her husband about her state. But on that very day, his ancestors came to him and asked the best of kings and wisest of men to kill some deer. Thinking that the command of his ancestors should be followed, he went out to hunt, thinking of Girika, who was exceedingly beautiful and like Shri herself. He was so excited that the semen was discharged in the beautiful forest and wishing to save it, the king of the earth collected it in the leaf of a tree. The lord thought that his semen should not be wasted in vain and that his wife’s fertile period should not pass barren. Then the king thought about this many times and the best of kings firmly decided that his semen would be productive, since the semen was issued when his queen’s time was right. Learned in the subtleties of dharma and artha, the king consecrated the semen, which was productive for producing progeny, and addressed a hawk that was seated nearby. ‘O amiable one! Please take this seed to my wife Girika. She is in her season now. The swift hawk took it from him and flew speedily through the sky.
The Adi Parva introduces the key characters and provides the background leading up to the great Kurukshetra War. It begins with the sage Vyasa narrating the story to the divine sage Narada. Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, is the son of the sage Parashara and Satyavati. He is requested by Brahma, the creator of the universe, to compose the epic to enlighten and guide humanity.
Everything is now understandable. It’s odious, that I understand…. Better if I understood nothing, better if, upon regaining consciousness, I shrugged my shoulders and climbed out of the bath. Would it have been understandable to Strogoff and Einstein and Petrarch? Imagination is a priceless gift, but it must not be given an inward direction. Only outward, only outward… What a tasty worm some corrupter has dropped from his rod into this stagnant pool! And how accurately timed! Yes indeed, if I were commander of Wells’ Martians, I would not have bothered with fighter tripods, heat rays, and other such nonsense. Illusory existence … no, this is not a narcotic, a narcotic has a long way to go to approach it. In a way this is exactly appropriate. Here. Now. To each time its own. Poppy seeds and hemp, the kingdom of sweet blurred shadows and peace — for the beggar, the worn-out, the downtrodden… But here no one wants peace, here no one is dying of hunger, here is simply a bore. A well-fed, well-heated, drunken bore. It’s not that the world is bad, it’s just plain dreary. World without prospects, world without promise. But in the end man is not a carp, he still remains a man. Yes, it is no kingdom of shades, it is indeed the real existence, without detraction, without dreary confusion. Slug is moving on the world and the world will not mind subjecting itself to it.
Some strange and very new sensation was slowly filling him. He realized that this sensation wasn’t actually new, that it had long been hiding somewhere inside him, but he only now became aware of it, and everything fell into place. And an idea, which had previously seemed like nonsense, like the insane ravings of a senile old man, turned out to be his sole hope and his sole meaning of life. It was only now that he’d understood—the one thing that he still had left, the one thing that had kept him afloat in recent months, was the hope for a miracle. He, the idiot, the dummy, had been spurning this hope, trampling on it, mocking it, drinking it away—because that’s what he was used to and because his whole life, ever since his childhood, he had never relied on anyone but himself. And ever since his childhood, this self-reliance had always been measured by the amount of money he managed to wrench, wrestle, and wring out of the surrounding indifferent chaos. That’s how it had always been, and that’s how it would have continued, if he hadn’t found himself in a hole from which no amount of money could rescue him, in which self-reliance was utterly pointless. And now this hope—no longer the hope but the certainty of a miracle—was filling him to the brim, and he was already amazed that he’d managed to live in such a bleak, cheerless gloom …
At this paint, finally, I understood that all this was extraordinarily amusing. Everyone laughed. There was lots of room around me and music thundered forth. I swept up a charming girl and we began to dance, as they used to dance, as dancing should be done and was done a long, long time ago, as it was done always with abandon, so that your head swam, and so that everyone admired you. We stepped out of the way, and I held on to her hands, and there was no need to talk about anything, and she agreed that the van driver was a strange man. Can’t stand alcoholics, said Rimeyer, and pore-nose is the most genuine alcoholic, and what about Devon I said, how could you be without Devon when we have an excellent zoo, the buffaloes love to wallow in the mud, and bugs are constantly swarming out of it. Rim, I said, there are some fools who said that you are fifty years old — such nonsense when I wouldn’t give you over twenty-five — and this is Vousi, I told her about you, but I am intruding on you, said Rimeyer; no one can intrude on us, said Vousi, as for Seus he’s the best of Fishers, he grabbed the splotcher and got the ray right in the eye, and Hugger slipped and fell in the water and said — wouldn’t it be something for you to drown — look your gear are melting away, aren’t you funny, said Len, there is such a game of boy and gangster, you know, you remember we played with Maris… Isn’t it wonderful, I have never felt so good in my life, what a pity, when it could be like this every day. Vousi, I said, aren’t we great fellows, Vousi, people have never had such an important problem before, and we solved it and there remained only one problem, Vousi, the sole problem in the world, to return to people a spiritual content, and spiritual concerns, no, Seus, said Vousi, I love you very much, Oscar, you are very nice, but forgive me, would you, I want it to be Ivan, I embraced her and felt that it was right to kiss her and I said I love you…
Even in a large city, the streets after a certain advanced hour of night are relatively still. What one hears and sees are apparitions and sounds to which both our eyes and our ears have long since grown accustomed. There are none of the usual sounds. People are at home, sitting around the cozy family table, or else in bars hunkered over their beers and political discussions, or in the concert hall, reverently listening to the pieces of music being performed, or at the theater, following the suspenseful goings-on upon the brightly lit stage, or else they are standing in pairs, or in groups of three or seven on some melancholy street corner, delving into profundities, or else perhaps aimlessly walking in some direction or other. “Hey there, car!” another cries out, and somewhere there might be a poet buried in his isolated room, drunkards wandering in wretched bliss from one still to another, bawling and harassing the passersby; perhaps a horse pulling a hackney cab is collapsing somewhere, a woman fainting, a scoundrel being apprehended by the always vigilant and safety-restoring police force—and suddenly someone shouts: “Fire!” Quite close by, it seems, a fire has broken out. People were just standing around, indecisive and bored, about to accuse the hour of lacking all interest and in any case starting to feel chilled, and suddenly here’s this great novelty being presented, something unexpected to kindle our enthusiasm. Everyone lurches forward and without realizing it has already begun a conversation with whoever happens to be standing alongside, cheeks are glowing, and now people are even starting to leap and run. They’re suddenly doing something they haven’t tried in a good two years. All at once the world appears changed, expanded, thicker, and more tangible.
A metropolis is a giant spiderweb of squares, streets, bridges, buildings, gardens, and wide, long avenues. When a fire breaks out, only the neighbors closest to the scene of the fire know of the conflagration. Indeed, in a huge city like this there can be three, four, or even five large fires in the course of a single night, far apart from one another, each one representing a disaster in its own right, an “event,” without one having even the slightest impact on the others: five suspenseful chapters of a novel, each of them self-contained, without links to the other. A metropolis is a wave-filled ocean that for the most part is still largely unknown to its own inhabitants, an impenetrable forest, an opulent, overgrown, huge, forgotten, or half-forgotten park, a thing that has been built up too extensively for it to ever again be oriented within itself. But now dozens of people are hurriedly racing to the scene of the fire. They now know approximately where the blaze is.
And now you turn a corner and the fire is right in front of you, it looks as if it wants to leap forward to greet you; an entire street is brightly, garishly lit up by it, it resembles a sunset in the distant south, ten evenings ablaze, a host of suns setting in unison. You see the façades of buildings looking like pale-yellow paper, and the bright red glow of the fire approaches, a thick, glowing, wounded red, and beside it the street lanterns look like feebly burning damp matches. And cries ring out. It seems as if trumpets are sounding everywhere, but this is a false impression, everything is relatively quiet, it’s just that you are running, and beside you, before you and behind, others are now loping as well, and hackney cabs are trotting past, and the electric tram passes by. There is something ordinary about all of this, yet at the same time something incomprehensible. Suddenly everyone stops short as if standing before a fairy tale. What now appears resembles a bomb effect dreamed up by an enterprising theater director.
The style of furniture changes as the individual’s relationships to family and society change. Corner divans and beds, coffee tables, shelving – a plethora of new elements are now supplanting the traditional range of furniture. The organization of space changes, too, as beds become day-beds and sideboards and wardrobes give way to built-in storage. Things fold and unfold, are concealed, appear only when needed. Naturally such innovations are not due to free experiment: for the most part the greater mobility, flexibility and convenience they afford are the result of an involuntary adaptation to a shortage of space – a case of necessity being the mother of invention. Whereas the old-fashioned dining-room was heavily freighted with moral convention, ‘modern’ interiors, in their ingeniousness, often give the impression of being mere functional expedients. Their ‘absence of style’ is in the first place an absence of room, and maximum functionality is a solution of last resort whose outcome is that the dwelling-place, though remaining closed to the outside, loses its internal organization. Such a restructuring of space and the objects in it, unaccompanied by any reconversion, must in the first instance be considered an impoverishment.
The modern set of furniture, serially produced, is thus apparently destructured yet not restructured, nothing having replaced the expressive power of the old symbolic order. There is progress, nevertheless: between the individual and these objects, which are now more supple in their uses and have ceased to exercise or symbolize moral constraint, there is a much more liberal relationship, and in particular the individual is no longer strictly defined through them relative to his family. Their mobility and multi-functionality allow him to organize them more freely, and this reflects a greater openness in his social relationships. This, however, is only a partial liberation. So far as the serial object is concerned, in the absence of any restructuring of space, this ‘functional’ development is merely an emancipation, not (to go back to the old Marxian distinction) a liberation proper, for it implies liberation from the function of the object only, not from the object itself. Consider a nondescript, light, foldable table or a bed without legs, frame or canopy – an absolute cipher of a bed, one might say: all such objects, with their ‘pure’ outlines, no longer resemble even what they are; they have been stripped down to their most primitive essence as mere apparatus and, as it were, definitively secularized. What has been liberated in them – and what, in being liberated, has liberated something in man (or rather, perhaps, what man, in liberating himself, has liberated in them) – is their function. The function is no longer obscured by the moral theatricality of the old furniture; it is emancipated now from ritual, from ceremonial, from the entire ideology which used to make our surroundings into an opaque mirror of a reified human structure. Today, at last, these objects emerge absolutely clear about the purposes they serve. They are thus indeed free as functional objects – that is, they have the freedom to function, and (certainly so far as serial objects are concerned) that is practically the only freedom they have.
A form of doctrine, theory, or practice having, or claiming to have, a distinctive character or relation: chiefly used disparagingly, and sometimes with implied reference to schism.
Etymology: Representing French -isme, Latin -ismus, < Greek -ισμός, forming nouns of action from verbs in -ίζειν, e.g. βαπτίζειν to dip, baptize, βαπτισμός the action of dipping, baptism. An allied suffix was -ισμα(τ-), which more strictly expressed the finished act or thing done, and which in some cases is the source of modern -ism. Besides its free use as a suffix forming verbs on ordinary nouns and adjectives, -ίζειν was (as mentioned under -ize suffix) affixed to national names, with the sense to act or ‘play’ the people in question, and hence to act like, do after the manner of, practise the habits, customs, or language of, side with or adhere to the party of, those people. Hence the noun in -ισμός had the sense of acting or doing like, siding with, adhesion to, or speaking like the people in question; e.g. Ἀττικίζειν to Atticize, to side with the Athenians, to use the Attic dialect; hence Ἀττικισμός, Atticism, a siding with Athens, Attic style of language, etc. The Septuagint (Esther viii. 17) and New Testament have Ἰουδαίζειν to Judaize, to live like the Jews. The derivative Ἰουδαισμός Judaism, the manner of the Jews, occurs in the Septuagint (2 Macc. ii. 21). The Latin Jūdaismus occurs in Tertullian (c200); Jūdaizāre in the Vulgate. Origen (a250) has Χριστιανίζειν to play the Christian, act the part of a Christian, practise Christian principles, and Justin Martyr (a150) has Χριστιανισμός the practice of Christians, Christianity. Hence late Latin chrīstiānizāre in Tertullian, chrīstiānismus in Tertullian, Augustine and Jerome. On the type of these, -ισμός, -ismus, became the ordinary ending to form names of religious, ecclesiastical, or philosophical systems; thus pāgānismus is cited by Du Cange from a council of 744. The Old French representation of this, paienisme, paienime, painime (12th cent.) is probably the earliest French example, and appears in English as painime, painim in the 13th cent. But, in the modern form and sense, Judaisme is found a1500, and christianisme (a1500 in French) c1525 in English. From the 16th cent. such formations are numerous.
1680 E. Pettit Vision of Purgatory 46 He was the great Hieroglyphick of Jesuitism, Puritanism, Quaquerism, and of all Isms from Schism. 1756 Monthly Rev. 14 359 Arianism, Socinianism, Arminianism, or any other ism. 1789 H. Walpole Lett. 4 Nov. Alas! you would soon squabble about Socianism, or some of those isms. 1808 R. Southey Select. from Lett. (1856) II. 182 It has nothing to do with Calvinism nor Arminianism, nor any of the other isms. 1811 T. J. Hogg Life Shelley (1858) I. 373 He is nothing,—no ‘ist’, professes no ‘-ism’ but superbism and irrationalism. 1820 R. Polwhele Introd. Lavington’s Enthus. Method. & Papists 118 It has no connection with Methodism, or Puritanism, or any ism or schism. 1820 T. Carlyle Let. to M. Allen Oct. I expect much pleasure from talking over old bygone things, from discussing Spürzheimism, Whiggism, Church of Englandism, and all other imaginable ‘isms’. 1840 Fraser’s Mag. 21 702 All the untidy isms of the day shall be dissipated. 1843 T. Carlyle Past & Present ii. xv. 158 This is Abbot Samson’s Catholicism of the Twelfth Century;—something like the Ism of all true men in all true centuries, I fancy. 1864 J. R. Lowell Rebellion in Prose Wks. (1890) V. 138 That class of untried social theories which are known by the name of isms. 1884 Kendal Mercury 3 Oct. 4/7 The principles on which Education Acts are based, irrespective of isms and creeds. 1928 G. B. Shaw Intell. Woman’s Guide Socialism lxxxiii. 447 The proletarian Isms are very much alike. 1968 S. C. Hutchison Hist. Royal Acad. xvii. 183 He saw no place in art for abstractions and ‘isms’ and had a very low opinion of their adherents. 1974 Listener 14 Feb. 220/1 Impressionism became the most successful ‘ism’ in the history of art.
初め無き 終わり亦無き 我は無し
(Beginning is nothing Ending is also nothingness I am nothingness.)
il y avait autrefois une vieille maison abandonnée, perdue dans les bois, que personne ne visitait plus. la porte de la maison grinçait dans le vent, le toit était fissuré et laissait passer la pluie. pourtant, dans cette maison abandonnée, il y avait un secret. un cheval y vivait, silencieux et immobile, gardant ce lieu oublié depuis des années. un soir, alors qu’il faisait noir, un promeneur passa par cette maison et entendit un murmure. il regarda autour de lui, mais il n’y avait personne d’autre que lui et le cheval. le cheval dressa les oreilles et écouta attentivement. il était le seul à percevoir les murmures dans la maison. il se souvenait des temps passés, des voix et des pas qui avaient parcouru la maison. mais maintenant, tout était silencieux. au fil des ans, la maison avait continué à se détériorer et à pourrir, mais le cheval restait, sans savoir pourquoi il devait rester là. cependant, il continuait à veiller sur cette maison, dans l’obscurité, dans le silence et la solitude.
Walking down a narrow street one evening, I stole a melon. The fruit seller, who was lurking behind his fruit, caught me by the arm.
Miss, I’ve been waiting for a chance like this for forty years. For forty years I’ve hidden behind this pile of oranges in the hope that somebody might pinch some fruit. And the reason for that is this: I want to talk, I want to tell my story. If you don’t listen, I’ll hand you over to the police.
