The thing about feeling depressed but knowing why I feel depressed is that I’m not afraid. I am reasonably certain that the state I’m in will come to an end on Wednesday, as I’m revived by tomorrow’s dose of Remicade. But if I know (from long experience) that Remicade will make me feel better, I don’t really grasp what’s making feel bad right now. The immune disorder that Remicade counteracts attacks my intestines, and that’s unpleasant but also clear and focused, unlike the rest of the malaise, which I can only compare to being locked inside a play by Chekhov. I would be despairing — despairing about feeling such despair — if I didn’t know that I’m going to be let out tomorrow.

As if to cheer me up, the little men in the gondola have just docked at our balcony, and begun hammering away at the railing.

***

 Well, no: they’re not hammering at the railings. They’re sanding down the floors, if that makes any sense. No wonder it makes such a penetrating racket. And dust everywhere. (They actually closed the windows that were slightly open — thoughtful.) And now they’ve gone down a floor.

For several years now, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History has been glaring down at me with its burnished orange jacket. It came out three years ago, and spent quite a few months in my reading pile. It’s so fat, though, that eventually I simply had to shelve it, something that I don’t like to do with books that I haven’t read. Anywhere, there is sat. I was wondering if I ought to give it away. Then, yesterday, when I finished Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire and thought, for a moment, of turning to Joseph Lelyveld’s book bout Gandhi (still in a pile), I changed my mind at the last second and pulled down Doniger instead. I’m already about a third of the way through — it’s a great read! Doniger’s openly revisionist idea is to write a history of the Vedic religion(s) that is free of Brahmin tendentiousness. But she does not assume that you are familiar with the field, as indeed I am not. Somewhere, I think, I have editions of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, and I read a bit of the latter once. But I never guessed that the Hindu texts come in waves, beginning with the Rig Veda (and the other Vedas), followed by the Brahmanas, the Upanishads, and so on. It’s as though Vedic scripture were all Talmud and no Torah — or mostly Talmud, anyway (the Vedas bring Leviticus to mind). The Upanishads were written before and after a period of massive dissent, during which both the Buddhists and the Jains broke away from Vedic orthodoxy — or “orthopraxy,” as Doniger prefers, since correct behavior was generally more important than correct doctrine (inverting the Christian stress). Doniger is my kind of historian, very skeptical of “just-so” stories and hindsight-infected interpretations. (“But why assume any cult at all?”, she writes of Harappan seals. “Why need they symbolize fertility?”) And she is determined to make the ancient texts as intelligible as possible. Her motto might be taken from the Brahmanas:

Why do you inquite aboutr the father or the mother of a Brahmin? When you find knowledge in someone, that is his father and his grandfather.

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2012 at 9:32 am.