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and vacant except for men taking their evening shit. On the water boats filled with people drift back and forth. Numerous candles on the water in cups of leaves, sparks of brightness. float with the current. dotting the grey black water, gently as though they had always been gliding on the river from the beginning of time and would continue, undisturbed for the rest of time.

March 28.70

Invitation to a Beheading by Nabokov

"Matter was weary. Time gently dogged." p 38

"For a while they were all silent - the earthenware pitcher with water at the bottom that had offered drink to all the prisoners of the world; the walls, with their arms around each other's shoulders like a foursome discussing a square secret in inaudible whispers;-" p. 29

"But then perhaps, . . . . I am misinterpreting these pictures. Attributing to the epoch the characteristics of its photograph. The wealth of shadows, the torrents of light, the gloss of a tanned shoulder, the rare reflection, the fluid transitions from one

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element to another - perhaps all of this pertains only to the snapshot, to a particular kind of heliotropy, to special forms of that art, and the world really never was so sinuous, so humid and rapid - just as today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world." p 44

March 29

Every society develops its own logic. It is not necessarily based on reason in fact it is generally not. Any way that you are used to, having been brought up from childhood, is comfortable. No matter how awkward or uncomfortable it may seem to others, you would not trade it. Any system may be made to work (given the right conditions) and made to seem logical. Everything develops its own logic. The self recognition of the Indians developed its own logic. Its origins long lost, clouded and muddled over centuries, Indian society exists at this time as a patchwork of traditions seasoned by the force of practical considerations. But in the contact between them the traditions still win out. At least as a cover. The merchant who