By VITHAL C NADKARNI
The newest Nobelist of literature, Patrick Modiano, is announced when your columnist is visiting Ujjain, renowned for its Linga of Light (Jyotirlinga) shrine dedicated to Shiva as Mahakala, or Master Time. Now, Time and Memory are intimately related. And 111th laureate's forte is the 'art of memory' with which he has "evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of Occupation", according to the citation. Modiano has also been hailed as the Marcel Proust of our times. Proust, who did not snag aNobel himself, wrote his sixpart masterwork, In Search of Lost Time.
This can only be recovered through reconstruction of memory. Western tradition personifies her as Mnemosyne, the mother who gave birth to the nine muses of poetry. Ironically, the Mother Fount of Poesy also presides over the pool of forgetfulness in Hades. Dead souls are supposed to drink from this so as not to remember their past lives upon being reincarnated!
The myth may be based on an insight attributed to the Yiddish Master, Sholem Asch: "Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for human existence!" Indian tradition also bows to the closure that Time brings about. The sage bows to Time (Kalaya tasme namah) and the mystic-poet Bhartrhari, stepbrother of legendary King Vikramaditya of Ujjain, celebrated Time's centuries before Proust, "Is anything spared from the threat of eclipse? (Apathaghatha grastam na kim kena va!)," he asks in his The Century of Verses. "Transience plunders life’s treasures."
The newest Nobelist of literature, Patrick Modiano, is announced when your columnist is visiting Ujjain, renowned for its Linga of Light (Jyotirlinga) shrine dedicated to Shiva as Mahakala, or Master Time. Now, Time and Memory are intimately related. And 111th laureate's forte is the 'art of memory' with which he has "evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of Occupation", according to the citation. Modiano has also been hailed as the Marcel Proust of our times. Proust, who did not snag aNobel himself, wrote his sixpart masterwork, In Search of Lost Time.
This can only be recovered through reconstruction of memory. Western tradition personifies her as Mnemosyne, the mother who gave birth to the nine muses of poetry. Ironically, the Mother Fount of Poesy also presides over the pool of forgetfulness in Hades. Dead souls are supposed to drink from this so as not to remember their past lives upon being reincarnated!
The myth may be based on an insight attributed to the Yiddish Master, Sholem Asch: "Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for human existence!" Indian tradition also bows to the closure that Time brings about. The sage bows to Time (Kalaya tasme namah) and the mystic-poet Bhartrhari, stepbrother of legendary King Vikramaditya of Ujjain, celebrated Time's centuries before Proust, "Is anything spared from the threat of eclipse? (Apathaghatha grastam na kim kena va!)," he asks in his The Century of Verses. "Transience plunders life’s treasures."
