Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish… Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

HERMANN HESSE, Siddhartha

I was watching TV, working on my code, not paying any attention to what was going on. And I look up and hear Achilles say,

I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Beautiful. ‘Troy’, a movie that is pretty normal in most aspects IMO, packed a dialogue so intense, so true and elegant. I cannot even begin to express my appreciation in mere words, on the subtlety this transcends. It was like poetry…

Can’t quite put my finger on it but having worked on (in a weird sense) on both the atom and the net, there’s something mind-blowing in the following observation.

The atom is the icon of the 20th century. The atom whirls alone. It is the metaphor for individuality. But the atom is the past. The symbol for the next century is the net. The net has no center, no orbits, no certainty. It is an indefinite web of causes. The net is the archetype displayed to represent all circuits, all intelligence, all interdependence, all things economic, social, or ecological, all communications, all democracy, all families, all large systems, almost all that we find interesting and important. Whereas the atom represents clean simplicity, the net channels messy complexity.

New Rules for the New Economy. Check out his blog also. They contain some interesting nuggets of futuristic ideas.

Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself. Every object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception within us.

– Goethe

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

— Ellen Goodman

I used to think the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.

– Emo Phillips

One of the best moving quotes about Mathematics, something I feel so close to and deeply about, in words I could barely fathom to think and create as poetry, Bertrand Russell gives a killer of a quote, I’m bound to remember till I die. Here it is:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

–BERTRAND RUSSELL, Study of Mathematics

In life, the beauty of survival,
Reveals hidden truth in gentle end.
The sublime will, conveys meaning surreal,
Rejoice and celebrate with tears of joy.

One day, Another time,
In life’s long path, another moment.
I wonder if i will remember this crime
During the serene period of soccer and torrent.

The feeling of being satisfied and bored,
Sets in like a pus in a wound,
Nagging and hurting more than the torn ligament,
This shall haunt me for another three years.

Where shall i run again to hide ?
How can i start meditating to releive the tension ?
In agony, i pray for strength
And I shall conquer, as before, always.

Recently, i was talking to a friend and got into a conversation on some of the greatest poems. One of the first poems that came to my mind was Ozymandius. There are a lot of things that are striking about it ; The way Shelley describes the pride, the sarcasm about the ego, the practicality of the situation and the subtlety in the description. Anyway, without further ado and anymore rambling, i quote one of my favorite poem

By: Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.