Category Archive: Miscellaneous

Tab 3

Posted by Ankit On May 27th, 2012

A friend asked me recently if I still post on my blog. He was surprised that I still keep at it after 6 years but his surprise was perhaps not more than mine. I mean, really, what's there to say which could not be said in 6 years? There are no arguments to be made, absolutely none. Not about religion and not about evolution, neither about politics and nor about sports. All those subjects on which serious people can get together and have solemn important discussions are strictly off-limits for me. Personal finance, international geopolitics, economics, the environment and many other such subjects come in this category. Not only do I find these topics dreary but I know that I understand just enough about all these topics to know that I can't contribute to a discussion in any constructive way. In fact I tend to think that there is really no such thing as a constructive discussion. Nobody, to my knowledge and experience, has ever come out of a discussion with a meaningfully changed viewpoint. Either we agree with other people, in which case there is no need for a discussion, or we disagree with them, in which case there is no point of it. Young people who stand to learn the most from an adult discussion should really be the ones to avoid them like the plague because they would either learn all the wrong things or come out confused.  I completely agree with Wilde's statement that one should avoid learning from those who are older than oneself. And Feynman catches the same spirit in a very tongue in cheek manner when he says that 'you go through life, make your own mistakes, learn from them if you like and that's the end of you'. Calvin actually hits the nail on the head when he says that anything which cannot be explained to me in 10 seconds is not worth thinking about. Why am I saying all this? I don't know. It's a long weekend and I'm a little bored. Also, I feel that there is a conspiracy by those who know more than me (or perhaps they know less than me, I cannot be sure. They may even know exactly as much as I do but I rule that out on probabilistic grounds) to project life as more serious and more noble than I think it is. It's serious business, they say. They get together and discuss important stuff and when I jump in with a funny/sarcastic observation, I'm met with searing stern looks of disapproval. And meanwhile a supermassive black hole in a far away galaxy gobbles up a few more stars. Sometimes I wish there was a real time counter which would show the number of stars gobbled up by supermassive black holes. Then when people would be smugly discussing about their atheistic positions or giving me a hard time because I don't separate my trash in 7 different kinds of recycles or boasting about how their 1 year old has already started walking, I'd be able to direct them to that rapidly changing counter and politely point out that nobody cares.

I see that I have digressed a little but then all the interesting stuff in life is made of digressions. Meanwhile, in the spirit of this post, the title is completely unrelated to the subject matter. It has to do with the fact that at the time of writing, this post was open in the second tab of my browser.

The state of education

Posted by Ankit On May 14th, 2012

I was reading an article on the New York times regarding the state of the student debt in America. The total debt has recently climbed past a trillion dollars with 94% of the students under debt. The cost of education has consistently increased as the federal and the state governments have cut funding. The colleges, used to a certain level of luxury, have an easy option in continuing to fund their business by increasing student fee. And this, I think, really is the problem. That education has become more of a business than it ever was. Colleges compete for students by dangling the carrot of superior facilities, both recreational and academic. Recreational include elaborate sporting facilities with the associated infrastructural and maintenance costs and academic include competing to hire 'star' faculty and building impressive auditorium and hi-tech classrooms. The trouble is that neither of these has anything to do with education. Sport facilities add to the name of the college but they hardly contribute to the skills required for getting a job after college. Star faculties are under such an immense pressure to produce research results that they have little time to care for education. And really, good sincere education has nothing to do with how many Nature publications a faculty has.

So as far as undergrad education in America is concerned, finally it's a lot of razzmatazz. Colleges do flashy stuff to entice students who take massive loans to go to these places. Colleges do the first disservice by not communicating, in real terms, the magnitude of the financial undertaking and the second disservice by not bothering to impart the skills which the market demands. Because for better or for worse, it's just that. That education is a business. There is a demand for each and every skill and if the supply overstrips the demand then a lot of people would find themselves out of luck. There was an associated article on Nytimes where experts suggested ways to combat the problem of the burgeoning student debt. I was surprised that nobody suggested regulating access to education or at least making it more answerable to the market realities. I would think that making it more difficult to get different kinds of education (with higher standards for example) when people have other choices is a better way than to tell them down the line that all the years they spent learning something isn't sufficient to get them a living. At that point there isn't only a lack of prospects but also, perhaps, a crushing sense of defeat and injustice. This disconnect between promise and reality is not restricted undergrad education either. I see it, much closer to my own experience, at the grad level too. The number of PhDs that are produced here (in non CS fields let's say) has little to do with the prospects that they have. Much has been said of the intense competition to grab the few faculty positions that are on offer every year. And perfectly smart people who could have contributed creatively to fields commensurate with their level of intelligence grind away competing against those who are either much smarter or those who have ground for yet longer.

If at every educational stage the entrance is tough enough to account for the eventual prospects, it seems that people would in general be happier. Of course it would mean that colleges cannot post consistent fiscal growth percentages and cannot perhaps boast of high rankings in US News but that should not be the concern in the first place. In an ideal world a college should provide a student an education which opens his mind and introduces him to the joys of learning. In a non-ideal world such as ours, it should at the very least provide the students with the skills necessary to make a living better than what he could have made without them. I get reminded of a little essay by George Orwell where he points out one aspect of the ridiculous human condition. The introduction of machines should ideally have led to more leisure for everyone since we did not have to work as hard to produce as much. But we decided, instead, to reduce the workforce. The result was that some of us who had jobs were overworked and the rest of us were unemployed - everyone was miserable. This was obviously due to the fact that those who owned the machines wanted to make as much profit as they could. There isn't anything wrong with that. It's just the way it is and that's more or less what is happening to education. Those who have the means of providing education have chosen to maximize profits and the result is a highly skewed workforce. The workforce is such that those who 'make it', are forever looking over their shoulders. They are never really happy. On the other hand those who haven't made it are unsatisfied because they were promised much more than they received. Alas, this is what we have chosen, in every single aspect of our lives. To be unhappy and unsatisfied for vague notions of grandeur and simplistic received ideas of success.

Duchamp's letter

Posted by Ankit On April 15th, 2012

I came across the following letter which Marcel Duchamp sent to his brother-in-law Jean Crotti when asked about his opinions on an art piece. Duchamp was a trailblazing artist of the earlier part of the 20th century and has arguably done more than anyone else to shape the artistic sensibilities of the modern Western world. He has been a polarizing figure and I have had more than my share of snickering disapprovals (mostly at the hands of MV) for being fascinated by this artist. Something tells my that the ideas in the letter apply more generally to life.

You were asking my opinion on your work of art, my dear Jean - It's very hard to say in just a few words - especially for me as I have no faith - religious kind - in artistic activity as a social value.

Artists throughout the ages are like Monte Carlo gamblers and the blind lottery pulls some of them through and ruins others - To my mind, neither the winners nor the losers are worth bothering about - It's a good business deal for the winner and a bad one for the loser.

I do not believe in painting per se - A painting is made not by the artist but by those who look at it and grant it their favors. In other words, no painter knows himself or what he is doing - There is no outward sign explaining why a Fra Angelico and a Leonardo are equally 'recognized'.

It all takes place at the level of our old friend luck - Artists, who in their own lifetime, have managed to get people to value their junk are excellent traveling salesmen, but there is no guarantee as to the immortality of their work - And even posterity is just a slut that conjures some away and brings others back to life (El Greco), retaining the right to change her mind every 50 years or so.

This long preamble just to tell you not to judge your own work as you are the last person to see it (with true eyes) - What you see neither redeems nor condemns it - All words used to explain or praise it are false translations of what is going on beyond sensations.

You are, as we all are, obsessed by the accumulation of principles or anti-principles which generally cloud your mind with their terminology and, without knowing it, you are a prisoner of what you think is a liberated education-

In your particular case, you are certainly the victim of the 'Ecole de Paris', a joke that's lasted for 60 years (the students awarding themselves prizes, in cash).

In my view, the only salvation is in a kind of esotericism - Yet, for 60 years, we have been watching a public exhibition of our balls and multiple erections - Your Lyons grocer speaks in enlightened terms and buys modern painting -

Your American museums want at all costs to teach modern art to young students who believe in the 'chemical formula'-

All this only breeds vulgarization and total disappearance of the original fragrance.

This does not undermine what I said earlier, since I believe in the original fragrance, but, like any fragrance, it evaporates very quickly (a few weeks, a few years at most). What remains is a dried up nut, classified by the historians in the chapter 'History of Art'-

So if I say to you that your paintings have nothing in common with what we see generally classified and accepted, and that you have always managed to produce things that were entirely your own work, as I truly see it, that does not mean you have the right to be seated next to Michelangelo-

What's more, this originality is suicidal as it distances you from a 'clientele' used to 'copies of copiers', often referred to as 'tradition'-

One more thing, your technique is not the 'expected' technique - It's your own personal technique, borrowed from nobody - And there again, this doesn't attract the clientele.

Obviously if you'd applied  your Monte Carlo system to your painting, all these difficulties wouldl have turned into victories. You would even have been able to start a new school of technique and originality.

I will not speak of your sincerity because that is the most widespread commonplace and the least valid - All liars, all bandits are sincere. Insincerity does not exist - The cunning are sincere and succeed by their malice, but their whole being is made up of malicious sincerity.

In a word, do less self-analysis and enjoy your work without worrying about opinions, your own as well as of others.

Affectionately,

Marcel

Winds of change

Posted by Ankit On April 8th, 2012

I stand on the shore as the waves gently roll in. There is wet sand between my toes and my feet sink in a little as I look down at them. It's all very quiet and cold and I wrap around my jacket a tad more tightly. There is a slight wind in my hair and its cold touch squeezes out a drop of tear from my left eye. It begins on its lonely, sorry journey on the side of my face. A few inches and it has already lost much of its promise. What started out from the eye with all of my hopes incarnate, is now but a spot of moisture and its essence has now vanished in the phantasm of its own non-existence. What is left behind is a dry white streak, a desiccated reminder of what could have been. The dry white streak is prominent and thick near the side of the eye and it thins out as it travels outward. It faints and sputters as if gasping for breath and finally it seems to give up against the onslaught of the cold wind and merges into nothingness. There was something brave about it. There was something hopelessly romantic about it. In some sense, there was something very artistic in its initial defiance. It seemed to embody the very essence of what makes us human, the courage to dream in the face of odds and be excited about the adventures of life. Its demise is a reminder of its own frailty against the brutal reality.

I am still looking down and the water is lapping up at my feet, taking away a little more sand as it recedes each time. It is cold and I hold on to my jacket. It is quite cold and very silent. The only sounds are the faint whistle of the wind and the far removed grunt of the deep ocean. And I keep looking down. I'm wondering how much will whither away in the face of such winds. I'm wondering about the lands which lie beyond the tumult and whether the edifices which this wind has begun to obliterate could even be recognized in their ruins. I wonder if I can come back here again some day in search of the scattered bricks and whether I can try, once again, to put them together and begin to make another dream castle, a frail little thing embellished with the audacity of hopeless romanticism and adorned with the fine beautiful beads of improbability. At least I hope so. Being unable to do that, for me, is such a sorry surrender.

Comics!

Posted by Ankit On April 3rd, 2012

If you were born in the eighties in the northern part of India it would be unlikely for you to not have come in contact with the rich tradition of Hindi comic books. I remember them with a fondness which I reserve for only a select few memories. Those comic books now appear to be an exclusive experience to me because they seem to have really picked up steam by the beginning of the eighties and waned by the end of the nineties. In essence, the best of them, the ones which were the most naively drawn and had the most amateur dialogues, exactly coincided with that phase of my life which for most people is slightly ridiculous, moderately impressionable and very gullible. With their wannabe-scientific bent and easy coincidences, those comic books still represent to me a bygone era which had the simple charm of innocence. The superheroes that my generation remembers as being often lanky and generally disproportional have since morphed into buffed up bodybuilders and while my heroes had to contend with 32 or 64 pages of rough paper, their modern avatars, driven by digital perfection, prance around on laminated sheets of super-digests. I don't necessarily rue their current manifestations. I just feel that what may have been gained in better drawings and tauter stories is probably lost in quirkiness.

My favorite was a guy called Super Commando Dhruv who actually did not have any superpowers apart from exceptional athleticism and a brilliant mind. He would patrol the streets of Rajnagar on his motorcycle at nights, preventing crimes and nabbing criminals. Now that I think about his character and about why I liked him so much, maybe it had something to do with his motorcycle. Also, unlike other superheroes who possessed superpowers I, in my naivete, perhaps thought Dhruv was someone I could emulate if only I tried hard enough! He was operating on principles which were coherent and understandable in my logical mind unlike someone like Nagaraj who would shoot snakes from his wrists. Even at that stupid age I realized, often with a mounting sense of resignation, that no matter how hard I tried, the singular talent of shooting snakes from wrists would continue to elude me. I would read Nagaraj's comics with an acute sense of derision which had its roots in a profound envy of those snakes. I would jeer at his victories and attribute them not to anything he had worked for but to the pure coincidence of his having been born with an unusual talent. My contempt was complete and Nagaraj's case wasn't helped with the poor quality of his initial drawings. I remember picking up his comic books and feeling a weird sense of happiness at how clumsy he looked compared to the highly agile and chiseled drawings of Dhruv. When the illustrator of Dhruv (Anupam Varma I think) decided to draw Nagaraj, I never really forgave him for doing that.

There was an entirely different genre of Hindi comics which doesn't really have an easy analogue in the Western canon. These were published by Diamond comics and featured such brilliant creations as 'Chacha Chaudhary', 'Billoo', 'Pinki', and 'Raman'. They were mostly drawn by this guy called 'Cartoonist Pran' whose biography has to be the most circulated one in the history of the world. His slightly plump face, as featured in every single one of those damn comic books, is forever etched in the pages of my memory. Diamond comics were characterized by hilariously bad drawings and mind-bogglingly ridiculous story-lines. Its world mostly consisted of green fields, awkwardly placed trees and criminally disproportional characters. They featured villains who, even at the worst, were merely naughty compared to Raj comics (Dhruv, Nagaraj etc.). I do think that Diamond comics, more than any other, derived its essence from the prevailing Indian sensibilities which implicitly stressed finding happiness and pleasure in the small things in life as the odds of achieving bigger targets were so small. I actually grew on to love those comics and now that I am thinking about it, I feel that that change was very analogous to how children, who begin by liking chocolate ice-cream, often go on to like vanilla as they grow old. There was something otherworldly and pure about their simple plots. An old affable uncle, a few kids up to no good, a dog, a family life dominated by a loving but overbearing female and a guy from Jupiter. How cozy!

Then there were all these other comic books which I never understood who read. Chief among these second raters were Manoj comics and Tulasi comics. I do not really have many memories of these since all my reading time was taken up by such superheroes as Dhruv, Nagaraj, Doga, Parmanu and the off-kilter characters of Diamond comics. There would be a thriving second-hand market for these and one often did not have to buy them as they could be rented for pretty cheap. I was fortunate to witness the essential progression of the Hindi comic. Beginning from what appeared like an isolated originality, it has now merged with the sophistication of the Western comic. I understand that I'm now dangerously close to sounding old and maudlin but I fear that despite the adaptations the era of the Hindi comic might have ended with my generation. Well, as they say, c'est la vie. I am sure that the current generation has its own preoccupations and that years from now it would look back at their demise with the same sense of bittersweet resignation that I have when I think of the surprisingly rich tradition of the Hindi comic (which, by the way, has no analogue in the Southern part of the country).

A simple 2d plot class for Android

Posted by Ankit On March 5th, 2012

Download (The zip file contains plot2d.java in src\com\android\graphbutton)

Thomas Thron has modified my code to make it editable in an XML editor. He has also added some new functions to plot data more easily and to have it plotted logarithmically. His java file can be downloaded here.

My post about the files:

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I have added an Android tab to the site. A dynamic 2-D plot class can also be downloaded from there.

Since I have this awesome piece of gadgetry in my phone I decided to learn a little bit of Android application development. I initially just wanted to access the various sensors in the phone but having figured that out, I decided that it would be cool to do something with all the sensor data that I now had access to. As a first step I wanted to make a dynamic plot for the sensor readings, bundle it all up and release it as a free app in the app-jungle that is the Android Market. Having very minimal java experience I tried see if I can find a simple 2d plotting utility. I found a small number of solutions but some were too involved and the ones which were simple were just too ugly to look at. I thought that even with my beginner's knowledge of Android programming, I would still be able to make something functional and not too bad a looker. So I made plot2d. It's a simple Android java class which uses the Canvas class to display a 2-D plot between two float arrays on your Android phone. It automatically scales the plot for different screens and decides reasonable locations for the axes. It can automatically add the axes markers too. You can use it in your own code/app if you want to show a quick plot. Here are some results which were taken using the screenshots of the emulator:

 

Improvements can obviously be done but this serves my purpose for now. The code which generates the above examples can be downloaded here.

...and the internet mobilizes

Posted by Ankit On January 18th, 2012

I think that we have been witnessing something absolutely fascinating over the last few years, periodic examples of leaderless revolutions which build momentum in a chaotic and unpredictable manner and spread to the widest reaches of the world at the speed of thought. The latest example of such an uprising was today's mass internet blackout over two anti-piracy bills (SOPA, PIPA) which the US Congress is currently considering. Thousands of websites went dark in protest and within hours, 4.5 million people had signed a petition on Google opposing the bill. As a result, several members of the Congress who had earlier supported the bill, overwhelmed by the grassroots response, ended up withdrawing their support by the end of the day. Over the last few months, several other immense institutions (Verizon, BofA etc.) were brought to their knees by internet uprisings with a swiftness which could not have been possible even a few years ago. The Internet, with its great reach and democracy, has started to flex its muscles and as a trailer, has begun by being pivotal in the toppling of decades old authoritarian regimes as part of the Arab spring.

I cannot help but think that this is a pivotal moment in history. Not only does Internet's resume already appear impressive, it also promises to be that tool which might usher in true accountability and democracy. And it would do it precisely by being messy and arbitrary. Sure it is strife with stupid pictures of cats and an endless barrage of memes but in its frivolity it gives voice and even legitimacy to the ideas of the next generation - the only ideas which are worth anything when it comes to the question of the future. As the Internet expands to subsume more and more facets of social interaction, the youth which would be the primary participant would start to have more and more say in the proceedings. And from the looks of it, it appears to be a good idea because then the important decisions would be made based more upon the views of a population which would be more educated and informed than it has ever been. Things start to rot when power gets concentrated in the hands of a few. They really start to stink when the powerful also start controlling the flow of information. Although democracy is expected to treat these ills, it's often merely a rigmarole where the elected end up being influenced by the powerful few and they perpetuate their stay at the top by keeping the population uneducated, uninformed, and divided on any number of lines. And in a traditional society they manage to do that because they control the flow of information. But democracy still is the best solution because it at least has the potential of being fair and fruitful. It just requires a mechanism where the elected can be kept on a short leash with the provision of a prompt whipping if they are found to be not performing according to their duties. The Internet, with its deep reach and immense integration across pointless divides, promises to be that short leash.

These are fun times to live through. The old guard seems to have absolutely no clue as to how to control the thoughts and opinions of people on the net. They have tried to make pathetic little attempts only to be promptly wrapped on the knuckles. And with every little victory which the netizens score, it seems that the old economy, old government and the old way of doing business loses another creaking support. I believe that the traditionalists will learn to respond better to the new challenges. There would perhaps be more legislative attempts at limiting the democratic and free exchange of information on the internet. We might even see internet lobbying becoming a trend in the future. Religion was said to be the opium of the masses but that observation is already dated in the modern world whose blind religion, I think, is popular entertainment as dished out on traditional media. As more and more people spend more and more of their time on the net, I believe that further attempts would be made to 'tame' the passion. But given the participatory nature of the net, I think that it's going to require much more ingenuity on the part of the powers that be to pull it of. For now they can only look incomprehensibly at this incongruous mechanism and wonder how much of a transformation they will have to undergo in order to be able to compete in this game whose rules already appear to have been changed.

Smell, nostrils, and averted ugliness

Posted by Ankit On September 14th, 2011

I was talking with some friends today about how the nose senses smell and how one can tell where the smell is coming from when I realized a cute little hypothesis which might actually have some truth in it. It appears to me that if smell were to travel through air in the way sound or light travel, people would have been a lot uglier than they are now! And if you bear with me for just a little longer I'll try to present the arguments which support the case that I have not gone mad.

Both sound and light travel as waves through the air. I may now resort to writing the equation of a traveling wave but that would do nothing but cloud the issue. What is important is that if a disturbance travels as a wave through a medium, like sound and light do, then it is possible to make a measurement of that wave at more than 1 location and say something about the location of the source of the wave. That is why we have two eyes and two ears because if we had only one of each then we would not have been able to determine the location of sources of sounds or the depths of objects. The accuracy with which the location of the source can be determined depends upon the distance between the points at which the measurements are made. In general, the closer they are to each other, the more inaccurate the assessment of the location. Now it is not hard to see how the accurate and efficient evaluation of sounds and objects would have been a winning and desirable strategy in the game of evolution. Therefore nature, being the brilliant designer that she is, has separated our two eyes and two ears by a considerable distance. To my limited biological knowledge, it appears true with all other species but I would be interested to know if this assessment is not correct. In fact, I would go as far as saying that if a sufficiently evolved alien specie were to be discovered on another planet and if it had auditory and visual sensors, they would most probably be in pairs (if not more) and that they would be separated on the 'face'.

This brings me to the point of this post. Smell doesn't travel through air like a wave and, therefore, its source cannot be as easily located in space as the sources of sound or light. The only way in which the source location problem can be tackled for smell, it appears to me, is by using its intensity and this is an inherently more inefficient way than by using the phase information for sound or light waves. Intensity processing also doesn't require measurements separated in space. It appears, therefore, that nature could do only so much for smell localization. It bestowed upon its creatures more sensitive noses but their nostrils were packed together because there is no inherent advantage in having them spread apart. And now the final picture emerges. If only smell traveled through space like sound and light do, our nostrils would most probably have been spread apart and what a ghastly scene that would have constituted! With twice the number of independent facial fissures humanity would surely have been a trainwreck, and for all we know it may just be possible that that quintessential fuel of the evolutionary machinery, mating, may have been resolutely refused by all. It would really have been a nightmare!

Sounds of the Tambourine

Posted by Ankit On August 18th, 2011

Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

and I remember those days when I would go to the beach and stand on the shore, looking at the crimson sunset and the ocean surface upon which it melted into a golden denoument, and the flock of birds in pristine geometric patterns wading across the sky in inky silhouettes against a backdrop of clouds in all hues of orange. I would hear the distant sound of the crashing waves and interspersed within it the faint notes of people patiently looking, waiting for that one moment when sky and the water are separated by the final breath of the dying Sun. I remember being so completely taken by the grandeur of it all that I would feel overcome with an overwhelming weariness and an intense inertia against the idea of being at any other place except that. And I would look on long after the evening's empire had returned into sand having taken with it all of my energy and all my purposes.

I have often wondered what is it about Dylan's 'Tambourine Man' which I love so much and perhaps it has to do with the immediacy with which his lines capture some of my fondest emotions. That a beautiful sunset evokes in me a heavy, even sad feeling more than it evokes fascination is something I could never have been aware of, had I not read it in someone else's words. The final paragraph of the song is the most poignant ode to freedom I have ever read. Freedom not in its parochial sense but in its deepest, most intense form. So fundamental that it escapes both a coherent definition and also the root of its own rebellion but is gracefully manifest in the images which the lines provoke - like the credits of a movie, like a swan song, like the final page of a great book, an afterthought of a dot below an elaborate signature - an ending silent, aloof and contented:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Proust and Reading

Posted by Ankit On August 11th, 2011

In those times when I'm reading Proust or listening to Gulzar do I sometimes feel that my own linguistic inadequacy prevents me from expressing my own thoughts with the transparency and delicacy that I hold so dear in the language of some of the masters. There is something about Proust's prose, for example, which not only tells you, the reader, a story but transports you into the shoes of the narrator himself. From that point onward his fears and happiness, his visual memory, his observations are all yours and you feel being torn apart by grief and by exhilaration, you feel someone else's memory affecting you with such intensity that it comes as a surprise that you are merely reading someone else's account. If only you are ready to be swept away not by the words on the page but by the images those words are evoking, it will become a ride like none other. Your own love stories, not having been put in such perfection of thoughts, would appear bland, your own life, not having access to such sensitivity, would appear worthless. And while you are perfectly aware that there is nothing particularly heroic about his recollections and that there is none of the glamour of adventure that we associate with interesting tales, you are aware that there is something far more poignant about what he has to say. He speaks about life. Imperfect, immoral, nervous and weak life and he speaks about it in the only way it's worth listening to. There is nothing of the blandness of mediocrity, supplicating for your attention and sympathy. His artistry demands attention and you cannot look away.

I believe that this is one of the foremost purpose of art. To make life presentable. To free it from its sorry drudgery, to liberate it from its already penned down certainty. Love stories are a dime a dozen but good love stories are few and far between. Human struggle is a mighty boring subject unless it's narrated by a good raconteur. There is no limit to which I would not go in order to avoid listening to the heartbreak of love but if it's the story of Swann, ah, that's a different thing. Reading literature for the story sounds unappealing to me. Reading it in order to gain some life perspective out of it is a positively disgusting idea. I love reading for the style of it and for the fact that through its misty vague glasses the jagged edges of life appear smooth, its torn troglodytic appearance seems presentable, even beautiful, and because life in its original unadorned form is too crude, too uncivilized, and too vulgar to be a satisfactory subject of cogitation.

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