Skip to main content

Quest

Photo by Tomichan Matheikal


In one of his poems John Keats presents a knight who met an exceptionally beautiful woman in some distant land. The knight instantly fell in love with her beauty. But the woman disappeared after tantalising the knight’s passions. The knight started searching for her. He never gave up the search though the woman seemed untraceable. If you reach that land even today, you will find that knight roaming there like a weary skeleton continuing his endless quest, says the poet.

Genuine quests are endless. Saint Augustine of the Catholic Church famously said, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” That you was god for Augustine. Augustine was quite an adventurer in his youth who enjoyed life to the hilt like other young men of his time. He had his fair share of beautiful women too who did not elude him like Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci.

The women did not, however, satisfy Augustine’s passions. God did. God is infinity. Anyone can go on questing after infinity for any length of time without ever getting tired. Keats’ knight was exasperated because his quest was limited to beauty. Keats equated truth with beauty. His quest was for beauty in life. He died at the age of 25. Limited quests can kill you too early.

Saint Augustine lived up to the ripe age of 75. His quest was for infinity. He contributed some silly notions too like the original sin. No one is infallible in spite of the genuineness of one’s quest. But genuine quests keep you going for a long time.  Our heart is indeed restless until it rests in what is our own truth. Our own truth, not the truths given by our parents, society, religion, political leaders, etc.

Our own truth is the only truth worth living for. Discover it. The path towards that truth is what I call quest. This quest ends only when you die. It is a perpetual search because truth is as elusive as the water in your palm. You have to keep on gathering it whenever the occasion arises. That willingness to catch the truth at the required time is the mark of the person on a genuine quest.

PS. #BlogchatterA2Z
Tomorrow: Religion



Comments

  1. CRDApril 19, 2018 at 11:02 PM

    I didn't know that hymn was inspired by Saint Augustine's words. Thank you :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 20, 2018 at 9:21 AM

    It's like Bob Dylan once wrote in his song " take what you have gathered from coincidence"

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Egregious

·       Donald Trump terminated all trade negotiations with Canada “based on their egregious behaviour.” ·       Pakistan has an egregious record of assassinations among its leaders. ·       Benjamin Netanyahu’s egregious disregard for civilian suffering has drawn widespread international condemnation. Now, look at the following sentences. ·       Archias is an egregious and most excellent man. [Cicero’s speech in 62 BCE] ·       “An egregious captain and most valiant soldier.” [Roger Ascham in 1545] U p to about 16 th century, the word egregious had a positive meaning: excellent or outstanding . Cicero was defending Greek poet Aulus Licinius Archias’s request for Roman citizenship. Archias had left his country out of disgust for the corruption of its Seleucid rulers. Ascham was speaking about the qualities of valiant soldiers when he used the ...
6 comments
Read more