Datta, dayadhvam, damyata

It is less than a month before I return to work. I am looking forward to returning to work, seriously. Summer comes to an end and in the fall it is great to be around the students and hear them complain how the summer came and went and they wish it wasn't over. It is the end. In three weeks I will be back in the hussle and bussle of school work once more. The reality is that the thunder sound of work approaching has always been a source of pleasure for me. Perhaps this is the best time of the year... the impending thunderous avalanche of work rushing towards me and me smiling while I wait. Idealism at its best. Thunder, thunder, thunder.

The Return...

Something has returned in me... I began re-reading The Brothers Karamazov again. I started the re-read before I left for Japan and did a great deal of it on the plane back and forth. The return I speak of is that instant joy and pleasure reading has always produced in me. I lost it briefly when everything became absurd but I have regained it now with more momentum. I want nothing more than to be lost in literature like before.

The Beginning...

Two years before my father died, I happened to come across author Paul Auster for the very first time as a recommendation by a friend of mine. Needless to say, I quickly became a devoted fan of all his books. The first, however, was The Invention of Solitude; a book that changed my relationship with my father forever. I credit this book by igniting the fire that went on to resolve my relationship with my father. Here's a critical passage from the book:

When the father dies, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, nor even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father. Inexplicable, he finds himself shaking at that moment with both happiness and sorrow, if this is possible, as if he were going both forward and backward, into the future and into the past. And there are times, often there are times, when these feelings are so strong that his life no longer seems to dwell in the present.

The Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle the passing of my father and how it has affected me.