He sees stray daffodils (buttercups is his preferred terminology) and trees in bud on the sidewalks, walking towards his makeshift castle of books, under a lilac sunset. He make a mental note to himself must write a hymn to (and of) renewal tomorrow. And tomorrow comes, and is soon run over by the chores he has to do - wash clothes, procure food, pay bills, make long postponed phone calls, reducing weekday sleep deficit etc.

Spring sun streams into his room through the open window along with the white noise of a city. Is this the silence that Rilke advised the young poet to venture deep into? If it is, why does it make him melancholic? Why does it make him want to leave his room, and the two books that he had started to read the previous night, to wander the city streets? Why does it remind him of the low fever of unfulfilled desire that lurks inside human bodies? Why does it disrupt his - long amiss and unpracticed - sitting meditation with anxiety, portents of dissatisfaction, and memories of words said and heard in haste or distaste? Why does the beginning of this new season - greeted with unbridled enthusiasm by other creatures and life forms - seem to also pulse with suffering or dukkha?

Finds him waking up cold. He knows that his innards have already turned to ice. And that his interior weather, in whose steadiness he once took great pride in, has turned capricious; this is the only way he can explain those sudden thaws he experiences between the shopping aisles.

Yesterday it happened between baby needs and baby food; he sat down, his face heavy with this sudden sadness. Is this what it entails, belonging to the tribe - "the tribe Maeve Brennan once called “travelers in residence” — men and women suspended between continents; suspended, too, between memory and forgetting" - whose name he only discovered via reading yesterday?

There is no cost to be liquid again, to allow himself to flow into the shape of a life, of affection, of giving, and of grace. But there is a reluctance now that he must wait out. There is this need to be stone, to live out an ice age before summer arrives, and spring departs.

There is an interesting conversation/ debate going on over at Sepia Mutiny on the wisdom of authority figures cutting off dorm room internet access to students at certain IITs. Clearly my response to this is very conditional, tending towards the Luddite camp than the Free Love one. When I was at one (in Kharagpur) years ago internet was a rare commodity, and access to it was conditional at best - you had to know hackers who had access to certain labs that were better wired than others - with typical blazing speeds of 50 bytes/second. Email for a long time was via Grex on CRT terminals; ones that glow green and don't do Windows.

While this was frustrating at times (especially when I wanted to access image heavy art pages), I don't think the overall quality of life suffered too much because of this. Further, given the amount of time I waste on internet distractions now, I think such time was better spent then consuming books. Something that would be interesting to look at is the correlation between internet speed and the book circulation numbers from the small but excellent libraries that each hall/dorm has*. An initial hypothesis: these numbers are inversely related.

* Some of the most ferocious readers I have met were those who used these libraries; there were long waiting lists and jockeying for position when the latest literary novels arrived.