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

Being Christian in BJP’s India

A moment of triumph for India’s women’s cricket team turned unexpectedly into a controversy about religious faith and expression, thanks to some right-wing footsloggers. After her stellar performance in the semi-final of the Wormen’s World Cup (2025), Jemimah Rodrigues thanked Jesus for her achievement. “Jesus fought for me,” she said quoting the Bible: “Stand still and God will fight for you” [1 Samuel 12:16]. Some BJP leaders and their mindless followers took strong exception to that and roiled the religious fervour of the bourgeoning right wing with acerbic remarks. If Ms Rodrigues were a Hindu, she would have thanked her deity: Ram or Hanuman or whoever. Since she is a Christian, she thanked Jesus. What’s wrong in that? If she was a nonbeliever like me, God wouldn’t have topped the list of her benefactors. Religion is a talisman for a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong in imagining that some god sitting in some heaven is taking care of you. In fact, it gives a lot of psychologic...
26 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

The wisdom of the Mahabharata

Illustration by Gemini AI “Krishna touches my hand. If you can call it a hand, these pinpricks of light that are newly coalescing into the shape of fingers and palm. At his touch something breaks, a chain that was tied to the woman-shape crumpled on the snow below. I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable – but I always was so, only I never knew it! I am beyond the name and gender and the imprisoning patterns of ego. And yet, for the first time, I’m truly Panchali. I reach with my other hand for Karna – how surprisingly solid his clasp! Above us our palace waits, the only one I’ve ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming and dissolving again like fireflies in a summer evening.” What is quoted above is the final paragraph of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Palace of Illusions which I reread in the last few days merely because I had time on my hands and this book hap...
12 comments
Read more

Hollow Leaders

A century ago, T S Eliot wrote about the hollowness of his countrymen in a poem titled The Hollow Men . The World War I had led to a lot of disillusionment with the collapse of powerful empires and the savagery of the war itself which unleashed barbaric slaughter. The generation that survived was known as the “Lost Generation.” Before the war, Western civilisation was sustained by certain values and principles given by religion, the Enlightenment, and Victorian morality. The war showed that science and technology, which could improve life, had actually produced machine guns, gas warfare, and mass death. Religion became hollow. People became hollow. “We are the hollow men,” Eliot’s poem began. The civilisation looked sophisticated from outside, but it was empty inside. There is a lot of religion today in the world. My country has allegedly become so religious that it decides what you will eat, wear, which god you will pray to, and even the language for communication. The ultimat...
16 comments
Read more