Another Note on Eat, Pray, Love (366)

"The Balinese believe we are each accompanied at birth by four invisible brothers, who come into the world with us and protect us throughout our lives. When the child is in the womb, her four siblings are even there with her--they are represented by the placenta, the amniotic fluid, the umbilical cord, and the yellow waxy substance that protects an unborn baby's skin. The child is taught from earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength, and poetry."

The Balinese could have taught John Keating one thing or two about poetry, no? We don't read poetry because it's cute, nor because we are the members of the human race. 

We read poetry in order to be safe and happy in life. 

Menyitir Thoreau

Rather than love,

than money,

than faith,

than fame,

than fairness,

than truth,

give me sanity.

This Week's Words of Wisdom

"Home is always an absurd concept, no?"
"Home is a concept with messianic structure for me--always to come."

(Not-so) random conversation via text messages. #IHeartAjengTooMuch

Ben Anderson on Soe Hok Gie (1970)

"I'm teaching at the Fakultas Sastra. Mainly routine, boring duties. I feel a growing gap between myself and my old world, a world I love very much--the student world. Emotionally, I'm still a student, though I have a teacher status. I'm finding it difficult to adapt myself emotionally to my new condition. If I have no work to do, I find I can't stay at home... I don't know whether this is just a stage, or whether it's a sign that I'll always be gelisah, and unable to live in peace."

Living in peace... I believe he thought of it as giving in, abandoning hope and accepting the exhausted routine and frightened corruption he saw around him. One could sense this in the words he used so often and loved so well--berontak, nekad, berani, djudjur, and bersih. It was because of this that he insisted on the moral role of the students in Indonesian politics, and attached so much importance to the solidarity of the campus and the streets. It was because of this too that he was so bitingly scornful of those student leaders whom he felt had decided to "live in peace" by accepting positions in the appointed Parliament and the attendant perquisites.

He was always uncomfortable when associated with authority, instinctively seeing power as the last enemy of morality. He used to refer to himself, with a smile, as an "anarchist." It was perhaps as an "anarchist" that he wrote to me: "I write in part simply to relieve my sense of nausea at our condition. Sometimes, though, I feel as if it's all useless. I feel that all there is in my articles is a few firecrackers. And I'd like to fill them with bombs."