And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass

(Ezra Pound)

Meandering through its days and ways, the year 2015 went by and left us its baggage of memories, good and bad. The still, sad music of humanity gets accumulated in our collective unconscious and finds expression through art, music, movies, and books. Every passing year leaves its imprints on the table spreads of our minds, especially when we look back through books we have read.

There are crumbs for you to collect, scattered here and there, gleaming in the dark, beckoning. It might be in order to share a few extracts from the writers I had the pleasure to read last year.

Though I had got the chic, hard-bound Alfred A. Knopf 2003 edition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Living to Tell the Tale about two years back, it kept lying waiting on the shelf unless I couldn’t help reading Gabito’s tale told by himself after his first anniversary in April, 2015. It was a veritable page-turner giving me first-hand insights into his magical realist oeuvre.

Marquez’s glowing tribute to his Montessori School teachers and director tells what it takes to be a real (Montessori) teacher: "[T]he Montessori school had opened at Cataca, and its teachers stimulated the five senses by means of practical exercises, and taught singing. With the talent and beauty of the director, Rosa Elena Fergusson, studying was something as marvellous as the joy of being alive. I learned to appreciate my sense of smell, whose power of nostalgic evocation is overwhelming. And taste, which I refined to the point where I have had drinks that taste of window, old bread that tastes of trunk, infusions that taste of Mass. In theory it is difficult to comprehend subjective pleasures, but those who have experienced them will understand right away…. I do not believe there is a method better than the Montessorian for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life."

Reminding of his short stories Eva Is Inside Her Cat and The Third Resignation, the death of Marquez’s real life Aunt Francisca is but grist to his magical realism machine. She schedules her dying and makes perfect arrangements for the event herself because she believes "that God would have called her if that was His Will": "One day she sat down in the doorway of her room with several of her immaculate sheets and sewed her own made-to-measure shroud with such fine workmanship that death waited for more than two weeks until she had finished it. That night she lay down without goodbye to anyone, without any kind of disease or pain, and prepared to die in the best of health. Only later did people learn that on the previous night she had filled out the death certificates and taken care of the formalities for her own funeral." (121-22).

Getting Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book (hardbound, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1977) was one of my moments of joy in 2015. Already engaged with feminist literature and theory for teaching purposes, reading Virginia Woolf’s father’s book written for his second wife after her death was an amazingly enlightening experience. When Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, died, the famous nineteenth century English critic and national biographer wanted to lift the spirits of his children. Therefore he (basically) intended to write a biography of his wife. But a Victorian papa, as he was, the book turned out to be about himself, not his wife, and his autonomous patriarchal "I" went ringing through the book.

Therefore Mausoleum Book, that became my summer reading in 2015, haunts me for Leslie Stephen’s alibi to inscribe himself instead of praising his wife. Addressing his children, he writes in the beginning: "I wish to write mainly about your mother. But I find that in order to speak intelligibly it will be best to begin by saying something about myself. It may interest you and it will make the main story clearer. Now I have no intention of writing autobiography except in this incidental way."

Sigmund Freud is a pet aversion for feminists because he took an orthodox view of women. Psychoanalysis, in winter season, September onwards, made a cosy reading. I was especially struck by Freud: …Off the Record by D.M. Thomas with a Foreword by Edward De Bono (Paperback, Watkins Publishing, London 2010). This book is an imaginary dialogue with Freud. In a Q-A format Freud himself answers the questions puzzling and plaguing the contemporary generation. In chapter "On Women," the questioner refers to Freud’s angel-in-the-house, orthodox wife Martha and asks: "Martha put the toothpaste on your toothbrush every morning. You believed woman’s place was in the home?" Freud takes two more questions and replies: "… I was often struck by a sort of psychic rigidity that overcomes women in their thirties -- as if there is little scope for further development. I speak of women in my time, of course. Perhaps your women have become lifelong psychic dynamos! But not ours, on the whole -- it was as if the effort to become women at all had exhausted them."

The shock of Fatima Mernissi’s death instantly sent me reading Dreams of Trespass: Tales of Harem Girlhood and Sheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems at the fag-end of 2015. That was my condolence gesture. Incidentally, when last year neared its end, I was reading The Crumbs of One man’s Year" in Dylan Thomas’s Quite Early One Morning: Stories, Poems, and Essays (An Aldine Paperback).

The first paragraph accurately reminded me of my reading crumbs from 2015: "Slung as though in a hammock, or a lull, between one Christmas for ever over and a New Year nearing full of relentless surprises, waywardly and gladly I pry back at those wisening twelve months and see only a waltzing snippet of the tipsy-turvy times, flickers of vistas, [and] flashes of queer fishes. …Of what is coming in the New Year, I know nothing except that all that is certain will come like thunderclaps…"