One Book to Read Before You Die

Many of us must have read many books; some good and some useless. I did too. Some books have affected me so much. There are some of my favorite books that I have read it. They are; ‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’ by Robin Sharma, which is a fable about fulfilling your dreams and reaching your destiny. And similarly, ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho, is an exciting novel that bursts with optimism; it is the kind of novel that tells you that everything is possible as long as you really want it to happen, just follow your dreams and heart. And other books like Gabriel’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre, ‘Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations,’ etc… are some of the excellent books to be read in one’s life.

Most of these books I read for one or two times, but one book that keeps me reading, again and again, is Salingar’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ At first, the title didn’t fascinate me. But, when I went through some lines, it really made me laugh with goddam cynical expressions. So, when I am blue, I pick up this book and read. I forget. It gives me a company.

‘The Catcher in the Rye’ is a godamn must-read book before you die. The book uses vulgar, crude, but humorous language. The story set around the 1950s, is narrated by a young man named Holden Caulfield, the main character. The story, which is supposed to be mirrored of the author J.D. Salingar’s life, creates a complex character. Holden seems useless and rejected students who suffer from alienation, desolation and directionlessness. He sometimes can be disaffected, disgruntled, and sarcastic. He lives in his ‘phony’ constructed world of imagination sometimes.

The book is loved by the former president of the USA, W. Bush, and quoted as ‘a marvelous book.’ I love the book. I love its language. The frustrated Holden shows up with so many vulgar languages like, ‘goddam,’ ‘it kills me,’ ‘how I hate this,’ ‘he is moron,’ ‘pain in the ass,’ ‘bastard,’  ‘crazy,’ and others that would keep laughing throughout the novel. It’s worth reading.

Derrida and I

Jacques Derrida -I like this man. He says something like this: there is nothing meaningful as such. There is no logos, no center, no origin, no presence, no absence, no beginning, no end…etc.  Things exist in buoyant. The word ‘love’ is not loved. It doesn’t signify anything. It can mean hate, kill, dark, murder, etc. And the word ‘hate’ would mean love, just like Gandhiji treated hate as love. There is no meaning as such. Everyone can deconstruct it. Freeplay is what I like. This inquisitive Derrida says, “The center is not the center.” Then, where is the center? It is beyond, what he termed as “transcendental signified.” Who knows, if nothing lies beyond the hills. But there lies. This seemingly crazy French man was asked this question in one of his philosophical discourses, “Where does the authority lie?” and the answer he gave was a toddler’s answer, “The authority always lies.” Every talking baby could have answered it in that way. It’s like asking him, “Where do the baggy testicles lie?” and you wouldn’t surprise yourself to get an answer, “It always lies there.” Not on your head, not on your cheeks, and you wouldn’t like it if it lies there somewhere. So it always lies there. Warm and fit.

But Derrida's metaphysical philosophy of absence and presence is not his philosophy. And funnily he accepts it as created by himself. It is there and it is not there. Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything. I bluntly argue with Derrida and say that he has taken it from my father. My father’s philosophy of no logos, no eminent presence is the same. The concept of no meaning, transcendental, etc was there already. My father’s religious canons taught me, and my father got it from his father, my grandfather, and my grandfather got it from my great grandparents, and so it moves back to the time immemorial, and no fella knows it exactly. If one has to know, then one has to get back to the origin of the world. There is no question of going backward now when we are living forward. I would pass the same information of ‘the center is not the center,’ without understanding much to my son and he would do too to his son.

I like Derrida’s free play, and I like free playing with words. Last time, I played with a girl after I read Derrida’s "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." “Big Boobs,” is what I said when she was crouching under the chair. She free-played the meaning and she didn’t talk with me for two days for just these two words. That almost killed me. Women always do chemical analysis on what they hear. If you say, beautiful to them, they would think about ugly. If you say my god, they would think they are goats. They are stupidly sensitive. They are the real Derridas. That is why; I talk very less with women. They would misunderstand and disrupt every golden droplet of the word and treat it as an ironic word.  

Derrida's deconstructions lead me to many problems. A few days ago, I told an auto driver that the right is left and the left is right. “So where shall we go, to the center,” the driver said. “No, there is no center. There is no right, no left man,” I joked with him. The auto driver curiously said, “Are you kind of in sense?”  “No, I’m saying, if there is no right, there is no left.”  That auto driver was blunt-headed; he shook his head quite puzzled. “Even I am puzzled,” I said to him at last. “Let’s live simple; let’s say it is right, there is left, why to break your head without any meaning,” the good driver said. “If you find the meaning, there is no meaning in it,” I said. The good driver laughed and said, “What's that again? I think you need some medications very soon.” Hearing his remarks, I sort of chilled feelings ran inside my heart; I lowered my head and ran towards my room cursing Derrida. I was kind of aporia, unable to decide whether I was really mad or sane. I realized after two days of thinking that there was no reality in everything, it was just construction. That auto driver wouldn’t in any way say, whether I was sane or insane. Because of the free play of meaning, I taught him on our brief encounter.