Humans’ Search For Life Meaning Endless
By Roamer
Man, said A.G.Gardner (or was it E.V.Lucas?), is a bundle of habits neatly tied up in a pant and shirt. It could be a lungi and angavastram for, just as in law Man embraces Woman (no, ñot a steamy event but legalese for the word Man including Woman in law, though in etymology it is the other way around) though East is East and West is West the twain do meet, despite Rudyard Kipling.
Mañy Eastern writers of English
(like me) forget to use ‘the’ quite often. Like the Russian who did not wear a wrist watch who asked a passer by (there is no ‘the’ in Russian) “what is time?”. The Englishman, half the twain, was aware of the missing definite article, but said, “That, my dear man, is a very big question,” as he did not wañt to go into the philosophical issue of eternity.
Like his knowing it is a definite article the friend who found mistakes in my post ‘quote
a quotable quote’ saw that the first word was a verb, the next (considering ‘a’ a letter, not a word) an adjective and the third a noun because he studied English literature while I read good writing for enjoyment and not for studying the grammar.
Read a book for study and you cannot enjoy it. I always held that one lifetime of reading eight hours a day is not enough to read, understand and contemplate all the works of one Kalidasa in Sanskrit or one Shakespeare in English. And there are hundreds of good books in every language. If you read many languages the search for the meaning of life can be endless.
I had a copy editing colleague who ‘edited copies’ and made a page (in the metal composing days) leaving blank spaces for me to headline When asked what it was about, he would say, “Sir, I only edited it but did not read it.”
So I was foolish enough to think that reading all the words did not mean reading a book or article. Speed readers who read a thousand words in ten minutes, I thought, forgot the meaning in five minutes.
I realised that I was wrong on both counts and that books alone cannot tell the meaning of life. Some grasped the meaning even when correcting mistakes and some read in a glace while those like me just enjoyed ,
