A YEAR IN RETROSPECT

A year, never mind whether it drags on slowly at the time or rushes by with a few blinks of the eye, always seems just several hours long when we are past it. It is as though our mind has taken the liberty to dismember the sequence of moments past and make myriad collages out of them. I don't own my mind. It is my de facto authority. I make of myself what it makes of me. And with everything that I do in a year, it grows, dragging me along. It shows me the world as it sees and with every passing day it perceives more and comprehends more.

I am my heart. I know what I want. I can sense beauty. I can feel love. But I can't survive. That is for my mind to do. How much a friend my mind is to me lets me do what I want. I would choose almost always what my mind would refuse to accept as profitable. My mind is right and I am true.

It is most often that we chance upon the unexpected that gives us the happiness we seek at the moment. Little things of beauty we hold on to and joy puts the angelic smile on our lips, the childlike sparkle in our eyes. My mind suspects. It debates. But it is trapped. It has been shackled by the prejudices and vices of the world. It distrusts trust. It can tell right from wrong. It is logical. But I can tell good from bad. I am free. I believe in the impossible and listen to the silence of my loved one.

I built quite a relationship with the world, thus, in the year bygone. In simple words, I grew up a tad and spun a personality and identity around my demeanour. Or so I would like to believe at the moment and precisely this my mind would prove to you now. It was, actually, a cocktail of a quarter hardships, some new assignments, a gill of fun, a pint of depression, gallons of love and a pinch of misunderstandings.

Every year is the same. A sequence of memories that last to come back to us when they feel most noticed; slaves to our mind that worships mood. A year passed is another glossy magazine’s back cover folding in on the last page, the glue stick being kept back in the stand at the edge of the table, the quill being replaced in the ink bottle – the latest addition to the library in our “mind palace”. 

REVIEW: The House On the Strand by Daphne Du Maurier

This is a novel published in 1969 and set both then and in 14^th century Tywardwreath, a Cornish village, which translates to “The House on the Strand” in English.

The story is a curious mix of science fiction, historical romance, psychological thriller and horror. A drug that transports the taker’s mind to the past as a witness to actual historical events, while physically remaining in the present, is confusing, addictive and uncanny. As with other Du Maurier novels, the narrative is brilliant. Experiencing the present very actively through the mind of the narrator, Dick, who agrees to test the drug and his effects for its discoverer and his friend, Magnus, a London University professor, and passively in the past through the same mind gives the reader the sense of addiction, similar sleepless nights, as the protagonist.

The perfect balance between the exciting romance in the past, with the narrator almost a voyeur, and the sharp, crude, overwhelming reality of the present kept me hooked to the story till the end, if only to contest the whole idea of the drug. This magnetism was the result of an uncontrollable desire to find out how the drug worked, and not merely a fascination with the idea of being able to wander off into a livelier and more melodramatic world six centuries past, so far only spelled out in tedious literature. To every trip Dick took, I tagged along, felt stimulated with passion and was covered with goosebumps when I returned; such was the power of the narrative, spooky and thrilling.

Though telling tales of people in the past, drawing from current scientific research and psychological theories, putting together Virgil, Dante, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Edgar Allan Poe, Chaucer and more, it has elements of the supernatural and an originality that grips you.

Not Du Maurier’s best and most famous, but queer and intellectually stimulating enough to be definitely worth the sleepless hours. 

P.S: This review and other reviews and amazing articles also published in http://bluestockingsmh.wordpress.com/