Sunday Reflection By Samik Sen

As I kept on tottering back to my cage, the whisky in my heart whistled out and the yawn between us lengthened. Tonight will be a stormy night, the line dances on the balmy breeze, as if it’s a floor softened, smoothened by the dance…so it happens, each time I try to kiss you, I die in the effort and so many deaths of mine turn your lips pink, as if paleness vanishes as you put it down on a paper… I am that paper, and you are so much without a pain….

I used to have a few penny left for fun and I wasn’t a frequenter of oly pub… but I used to have some excellent people around me who had fat wallets and they gave me treat for no reason at all. A slight tipsy, I used to move to and fro in college square, and often I used to talk to myself. One day I met another man, obviously drunk, and shamelessly alone. He stinks. And the smell transported me to an underworld… then it was all Dante and Virgil… I could recite from my memory lines from Inferno or some Elizabethan lyrics and I went on kissing that man so passionately that his spell broke like a peanut. Out came a tiger, an angry beast that growls if it is not given its share of self-oblivion. Every man has a right to self-oblivion, and nothing should take that from him…

As Boidurjyo says, I am pretty outdated so far as my literary taste and reading habits are concerned. Well, what he actually complains about is my incorrigible love for the classics and a snobbish indifference to all that sells well in the marketplace.
I think there is too much of the past in me. As I whistle down the memory lane some names swim upon the surface of my mind, some books, some essays I was taught to literally swallow by those from whom I actually learnt how to read. Right now, I recall two essays one by Leigh Hunt, what is Poetry and another is Pure Poetry. I was young and impressionable, and these two essays constantly kept on haunting me for days. I was also very fond of De Quincey and his Confessions of an opium eater was a book that I read many a times. As I grew up, I was introduced to the world of theory and theoryphilia led me to everywhere and nowhere. For I was in love with a cruel mistress who sucked my blood so softly that I couldn’t help pining and loving on…
Now that I am old, I return to my good old days, Hardy, Lawrence, British Romantics, early modernists and the decadents… These make me feel revived and think that all is not lost…