Milan Kundera, Carl Jung, Me, and Girls. Also, Dostoevsky, Poems, and Disability.

Ever seen people in a group discussion on the TV: how they do not listen at all when they are not the one talking. I have become the same: When I write it's only then that I read.

I became acutely aware of it when I finally finished reading The Joke. Towards the end for an entire page Ludvik was trying to drive home a theory, through his lament about Lucie, which I had thought of independently a long time ago (of course the book is double my age so I am the sucker).

The theory is that the person you love is in your head. Why love erodes with time is because as you become familiar with the person in flesh, the image, with which you were in love to begin with, becomes blurred and soon it is beyond recognition and your love beyond redemption. (Kundera's theory is in essence the same, though not exactly. He says that love is a function of the circumstances. Hence it gets incomprehensible for you to understand your past loves.)

Why Carl Jung in this theory? Because he says that everything, how much ever real (see-able, touch-able, do-able), is to an extent inside your head (which is very logical and obvious once someone tells you that).

Back to the theory and me. I am shy, especially to girls, to the point of being neurotic about it. I have often gone out of my way to avoid social encounters- the efforts including but not limited to not boarding a bus if some female acquaintance is inside, pretending to cough with eyes closed when passing by. As a result there have been, as Larry David puts it, shy-asshole confusions concerning me. But I am shy not asshole and so as a person who nurtures a healthy respect for himself, I have often used the aforementioned theory for self-justification which goes something like this: what's the point talking to her? of course she won't be as good as I suppose she is. she probably reads Harry Potter.

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Dostoevsky was fortunate to be a writer and not a blogger. As I tried to read him yesterday it occurred to me how easily the same content on a blog would have put me off. And how easily his rant about the modern man in the nineteenth century can be put in the same category as the twenty-first century teenage crib.

That has always been my problem with poems too: I can't tell between a good poem and a bad poem. And as I was laboring through the bores from underground and thinking about my poetic disability it dawned upon me that especially when someone is cribbing -- that is not exactly weaving a plot and not even making a point but just speculating, theorizing, contradicting, speculating -- the words acquire a certain lyrical quality and it may be good or may be bad but I can never tell.