A poem discovered recently.

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No Matter Where We Go - Henrik Nordbrandt

No matter where we go

we always arrive too late

to experience what we left to find.

And in whatever cities we stay

it is the houses where it is too late to return

the gardens where it's too late to spend a moonlit night

and the women whom it's too late to love

that disturb us with their intangible presence.

And whatever streets we think we know

take us past the gardens we are searching for

whose heavy fragance spreads throughout the neighborhood.

And whatever houses we return to

we arrive too late at night to be recognized

And in whatever rivers we look for our reflections

we see ourselves only when we have turned our backs.

Translated by Alexander taylor

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Found this poem in "The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry". The reason this poem appeals to me is the quiet sense of existential anguish that it's dowsed in, the realization that life lies tantalizingly close but perenially beyond one's fingertips and that it's always too late.

What is more important, I think, is the realization that -- for some of us at least -- the possibility of something -- dreams, an alternate world, love -- will always appeal more than the reality around us. This conflict, this emotional tug-of-war between yearning for a distant possibility and settling for an immediate secure reality, this confrontation of the abstract with the concrete is a theme of many lives*.

What I like is the way Nordbrandt brings about the insufficiency of this mortal life, how meagre it is compared to the substantial human appetite for experience, how there is never enough time to know anything completely -- even yourself (And in whatever rivers we look for our reflections /
we see ourselves only when we have turned our backs), how one cannot love as much as one wants to (the women whom it's too late to love), how no search will find what it set out to find and how knowledge as we know it is completely useless because it can never ever be complete. I like the way he does not over-dramatize but instead chooses to just simply say, "disturb us with their intangible presence". Intangible indeed.

Oh and the loneliness that runs through this poem like a quiet stream gurgling through a forest -- one cannot but quote Bertrand Russell, "...an individual facing the terror of cosmic loneliness". It is rather discomforting to come home and realize that nobody recognizes the real you. But then the lives we lead don't afford us the luxury of such truths and before we know it we've plunged headlong into the delusions that sustain us. Because, at the end of the day, one somehow has to find a way to remain content, to continue with life and believe in the possibility of happiness.

Another poem by Henrik Nordbrandt - Sailing.

* - Including my twenties thus far.

The honesty argument

In response to this post, a few comments talked about how honesty is a virtue. That it can't be a vice. My opinion is that "a virtue is simply a form of systematized behaviour that helps one to live life in the way one wants to", a means to an end. A vice is simply something which doesn't help the cause.

So let's suss this out.

Claim - Virtues can't be vices.

Counterclaim - Virtues are relative. Or, they can be vices depending on the "climate"[1].

One of the first interesting puzzles that one comes across in logical reasoning[2] is the "door-puzzle". A popular version of it goes like this - you're a prisoner awaiting execution. In front of you are two doors, a sentry guarding each door. One door leads to freedom, the other leads to death. The guards know which door leads where. You also know that one of the guards lies. But you neither know which door will keep you alive or which guard speaks the truth. You are allowed to ask only one question to one guard. What question will you ask? And which door will you choose based on the answer?

The key to solving the problem is consistency[3]; that the guards won't deviate from their behaviour; that both the guards are capable of virtuous behaviour based on their own moral code; that you can use your understanding of their moral code to your advantage.

What if the guard who speaks the truth speaks a different kind of truth? A truth which believes that the prisoner (who is actually guilty of theft) should be punished, that the guilty should not escape. According to that truth, he would actually lie (so that the prisoner chooses the wrong door and dies) but still speak the truth. What if the guard who lies believes in a different kind of truth? A truth which believes that theft is a demonstration of superior physical and mental ability. According to that truth, he would actually speak the truth (in terms of the doors) but still lie (if lying meant any act that helped the guilty escape).

I hope you are thoroughly confused now.

The point is, in the problem -

1. Dishonesty is a virtue as much as honesty is. That is if one looked upon a virtue as defined in the counterclaim.

2. Dishonesty is the opposite of honesty.

3. So what we are essentially looking at is something like -

Let's assume that, as per the claim, A is a virtue and A' is a vice.

Therefore,

A' = (!A) {inverse of A}

But as per the problem,

A' = A {the argument that lying/dishonesty is a form of truth in itself}

=> A = (!A) [4]

Or, if A can be a virtue, A can be a vice as well.

The problem with terms such as virtue, vice, truth, lies etc is that these are all dependent on the prevailing moral climate. The virtue (pun intended) of reading Nietzsche is that he awakens you to questioning the basic premise of society as it exists today -- why should the weakest survive? Why should the strong have to relinquish their strengths just to fit in with society? Protecting the weakest is the basic rallying call of society today. And honesty -- as a virtue -- is based around defending the weak. Defending the weak then becomes the way society wants to "live its life", and honesty is a form of "systematized behaviour" to achieve that. If society were to focus its efforts towards ensuring the survival of the fittest (fittest in any form), then the form of honesty required in such a society would be different. Why did the SS thrive during the Nazi regime? Why was betraying the Jews seen as honesty? Were they all so brainwashed? I don't think so. Just that almost all of them believed in the moral code which Hitler espoused.

To conclude, 'honesty' is just a term to denote a form of behaviour which helps society achieve its goals. What is important to note -- and think about -- is that there is no intrinsic value difference between protecting the weakest and ensuring the survival of the fittest[5]. They are simply two different ways of organizing society, each with its own arguments.

1 Climate being moral, social and political

2 A certain three-lettered exam should come to mind right now

3 Now is consistency a "universal" virtue? ;-) Answer to the problem somewhere on this page

4 "A is A" anybody?

5 Which is why I will always consider Pudhupettai a fabulous movie.

This made my morning. I'm no Aussie hater and I have a lot of respect for them. But every pre-match sign they gave out spoke of a lack of interest and maybe a sniff of over-confidence. This should get them to "start respecting the game ". They might have been rusty and over-confident but I wonder if they were smart enough.

I grew up in a sizable colony with a lot of kids my age which meant every evening saw an army of us playing cricket. Every now and then we would be chased off the streets by somebody who had enough of us breaking windows or trampling their garden, snooping around the crotons, searching for tennis balls. And we would shift to a new street with a totally new set of dynamics. If the earlier "pitch" was long and narrow, the new one would be short and wide. More often than not, one had to develop new strokes to utilize the spaces in the new "ground" and also shed old ones which no longer fetched optimal returns. The bowlers had to rethink their areas and the lengths they would bowl. More importantly, in the first few matches, the captains never knew where exactly the balls would go to place their fielders and what scores to set if they batted first.

Those first few matches were when you needed to be tactically capable and adapt quickly. It no longer made sense to have a good long-term strategy in place. Rather, a clutch of tactics became strategies for the time-being. It made you streetsmart, literally and metaphorically.

Point is, the T20 promises to be entertaining. Although the format appears to be more swashbuckling than scholarly, what will be interesting is the kind of tactics the teams use when they know that they have a whole new set of simultaneous equations to solve. This is as short-term as short-term can get. Australia have always been strategically strong -- have the best bowlers, fielders and batsmen and play the game hard. But the T20 is like hit-and-run guerilla warfare (although that might be stretching the metaphor too much). Strategic strength might not be as vital as it is in the other forms of the game. Each side has more resources than it can spend. It looks like an interesting couple of weeks.

Sun Tzu would have had a field day, I imagine. As would have Garry Kasparov.