Gail Omvedt's Seeking Begumpura
It is good to be in a quiet room with a text, engaging with it and thinking with the author. Reading Omvedt's work brings me back to the reasons I love reading, which is to have an honest connection with ideas.
For writing too, the same appeal: to tabulate one's thoughts in a precise and detailed way. To write it, one must know it and so the writer as a thinker is an important image for me. I came back to an old favorite, Summertime by John Coetzee and found this clarity. The author 'has' himself, and communicates this complex self through interviews of his former partners by a made-up biographer. A complex yet systematic way to probing at uncomfortable truths in simple, precise prose. A treat.
Some guidelines for the week ahead:
To choose your words is to spend time thinking about the positions you hold.
To write and think in a way that is at one with myself, without any doubt about the meanings involved. To spend time with it to make it a part of my thinking, or to discard it as useless, after carefully reviewing it.