Tropical State Of Mind Quotes

The real life of the East is agony to watch and horror to share. One of the three greatest joys in life is swimming naked in clean tropical sea. We need a root of personal experience from which to grow our understanding. Each new experience plants another root; the smallest root will serve. The lethargy of compounded discomfort and boredom is the trademark of the genuine horror journey. That state of grace which can rightly be called happiness, when body and mind rejoice together. This occurs, as a divine surprise, in travel; this is why I will never finish traveling. Loving is a habit like another and requires something nearby for daily practice. I loved the cat, the cat appeared to love me. As for me, the name Surinam was enough. I had to see a place with a name like that. Stinking with rancid coconut butter, the local Elizabeth Arden skin cream. You define your own horror journey, according to your taste. My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom. Add discomfort, fatigue, strain in large amounts to get the purest-quality horror, but the kernel is boredom. Bali- a museum island, boringly exquisite, filled with poor beautiful people being stared at by rich beautiful people. No sight is better calculated to turn anyone off travel than the departure lounge of a big airport.

The most important thing about India, the thing to be gone into and understood and not seen from the outside, was the people. It was as though, in these small, crowded spaces, no one really felt at home. Everyone felt that the other man, the other group, was laughing; everyone lived with the feeling of siege. The emptiness of the yard was an aspect of its cleanliness. The emptiness of the space was live luxury. Gandhianism was almost a mass hysteria in India, but of a healthy kind. It was the good old values, but packaged in a modern-looking way, very mass-based. As in old Rome, so in modern Bangalore: the more important the man, the greater the crowd at his door. Where there is no want, there is no god. The very idea of the latrine was a non-brahmin idea: to enter such a polluted place was itself pollution. No old-time brahmin would have even contemplated the idea. Good brahmins, traditional brahmins, used open-air sites, a fresh one each time. In the palace where the brahmin had served there had been splendor and extravagance beyond human need, almost as though in the Hindu scheme one of the functions of great wealth was to remind men of the vanity of the senses. In Christian thinking the eternal opposites are the forces of good and evil. In Hindu or brahmin thought the opposites are worldliness and the life of the spirit. One can retreat from one to the other. When the world fails one, one can sink into the spirit, the idea of the world as the play of illusion. Bad architecture in a poor tropical city is more than an aesthetic matter. It spoils people's day to day lives; it wears down their nerves; it generates rages that can flow into many different channels. That station lets you into the very worst of the Bengali small-town atmosphere - ugly, noisy, crowded, full of the kind of deprivation I see in the style of urbanization in our country, the deprivation of mind, of basic needs. I've been practicing yoga for about 15 years now and it's helped me tremendously to arrive at this mental state in which I could take an enormous amount of chaos and confusion around me, for a while, without losing my own peace of mind. Formally, I'm an atheist, but I've reached a state where I separate spirituality from theism and religion. To me the Upanishads represent man's effort to understand the universe and himself at the very highest level of spirituality.

No words can convey an idea of the beauty and delightfulness of tropical weather, at least while any breeze from the north is blowing. There is a pleasure in the very act of breathing—a voluptuous consciousness that existence is a blessed thing; the pulse beats high, but calmly; the eye feels expanded, the chest heaves pleasurably as if air was a delicious draught to thirsty lungs, and the mind takes its colouring and character from sensation. No thought of melancholy ever darkens over us—no painful sense of isolation or of loneliness, as day after day we pass on through silent deserts, upon the silent and solemn river. One seems, as it were, removed into another state of existence; and all the strifes and struggles of that from which we have emerged seem to fade, softened into indistinctness.

After that we had Math Class. Pencils ready! she yelled. If you’ve got a two thousand-piece puzzle of an Amish farm and you manage to add three pieces to the puzzle per day, how many more days will you need to stay alive to get it done? Math Class was interrupted by the doorbell. Ball Game! yelled Grandma. Who could it be? The doorbell ringer is set to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” which Grandma forces me to sing with her during the seventh-inning stretch even if we’re just watching the game in our living room. She makes me stand up for the anthem at the beginning, too. Mom doesn’t stand up for the anthem because Canada is a lie and a crime scene. It was Jay Gatsby. He wants to tear our house down. I went to the door and opened it and told him, It’s yours for twenty million dollars. He said, Listen, can I speak with your mother. You said the last time— Twenty-five million dollars, I said. Sorry, said Jay Gatsby, I’d like to speak with— Thirty million dollars, capitalist, do you understand English? I slammed the door shut. Grandma said that was a bit overkill. He’s afraid of death, said Grandma. She said it like an insult. He’s lost his way! Jay Gatsby wants to tear down our house and build an underground doomsday-proof luxury vault. Jay Gatsby bought a house on a tropical island once and then forced every other person living on the island to sell their house to him so that he had the whole island to himself to do ecstasy and yoga with ex-models. He forced all the models to take pills that made their shit gold and sparkly. Mom said he’s had fake muscles put into his calves. She knows this because one day she saw him on the sidewalk outside the bookstore and his calves were super skinny and three days later they were bulging and had seams on them. Mom said he went to a place in Cleveland, Ohio to get it done where you can also have your vag tightened up if you feel like it. Then you can just sit around with your S.O. vaping all day with your giant fake calves and stitched-up wazoo and be spied on by your modern thermostat which is a weapon of the state they just call “green” because of sales and Alexa and shit and practicing mindfulness hahahaha and just be really, really, really happy that you don’t have half a fucking brain between the two of you.