Transtromered

Transtromered could be an yet unverified process of falling into a trance upon reading the poetry of Nobel laureate Tomas Transtromer.

When asked if poetry was for entertainment, Transtromer said,

[Poetry] begins in delight and ends in wisdom (quoting from Robert Frost). [Poetry] reclaims an awareness of the world (quoting from Allen Ginsberg). [Poetry] strikes the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts (quoting from Keats) and when power power corrupts, poetry cleanses. 

When asked what he wants to achieve through the medium of poetry, Transtromer said, that in poetry he is seeking a kind of meaning in being present, in using reality in making something of it and not seeking empty calories of superficial entertainment.

And here is Tomas' Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Strands of (other people's) thoughts

The writing is both charming and infuriating, built of plain prose that blooms without warning into carbuncular vision.

She speaks as if the entire acreage of her skin were a listening device.

Vanishing is a way of life, of coping with the unbearable, of transmuting identity into something more manageable, if anonymous existence. Identity, like so much unwanted history, is a burden to be shed.
Relieved to be excused from love and marriage and all the preliminary and subsequent complications and mortifications that involved.

Fog banks of neuroses, in which even the most inconsequential gesture settles, like a heavy woolen blanket, over an aching heart.

Literature in Russia is not as neutral a commodity as it is in the West.

Josef Stalin was like a Genghis Khan with a telephone; he made midnight phone calls (to end lives).

Gibbons tied up in the ribbons of my memory

This is a book that adorned the bookshelves of a majority of book-loving, a bit of Anglicized, Indians, especially Bengalis.

It probably lay in my father's bookcase as well, but I never got a chance to read Edward Gibbon's famous seven volumes on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (I just checked, it's now available in WalMart, indicating not only a decline and fall in the value of such books in contemporary America, but a total eclipse of it as well).

I carry with me an impression of the book as a "male" book, the product of male cogitation, i.e. greatly worried about things tangential to the minutiae of daily living in Victorian England.

Nonetheless, I am moved by what Gibbons said after he finished writing the book:

I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober, melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken away everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.