PROLOGUE

“Nothing is permanent, only change. Nothing is constant, only    death. Every heart-beat causes us a wound, and life would be a continuous bleeding to death if there were no narrative-art. The art of narration gifts us those assurances which nature denies us: a golden time that never rusts, a springtide that does not wither away, unclouded joy and eternal youth.”(Ludwig Börne)

Nature has also denied me many things (e.g. - to take but a single instance – I’ve not been given the strength of will to assert my views or my stand in private and public life), and maybe I’ve been trying to make up for those deficiencies in a roundabout way with pen and paper, and have perhaps tried through such efforts to feel some ‘cloudless joy’. Maybe this is the yearning of the subconscious mind- I wouldn’t know, a psychologist might. But I am not without doubt if those endeavors have attained the level of ‘literature’ (or ‘prose’). To hear the word, one feels that ‘prose’ is an aristocratic adjunct, a high-toned classical thing. There is of course nothing aristocratic about my writings, but perhaps even those mundane pieces have given me some happiness, some satisfaction,  a few perhaps ‘cloudless’ , most others basically  ‘clouded’. But at the same time there is always the conscious feeling that these writings are not entirely my private, personal stuff to be put away in my drawer, that these would be printed on the pages of books and magazines, read over the radio. That is to say, these words would be transmitted to the perception of the reader, and if as a result the reader also feels some resonance of my happiness, only then would those words be of any value, otherwise meaningless. Fruitful or futile, the writer wouldn’t be able to say; only the reader would.