to say this,
“‘Highest good is like water,’ says Lao Tzu.
‘Because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures without contending
with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way.’...‘In
the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for
attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.’ Tasteless, it
accepts all tastes, colourless, all colours, reflecting the sky, refracting the
white stones of its bed, dissolving or suspending the soils and minerals over
which it flows. The pulse of our bodies is liquid, as indeed all living pulses
are. Water dissolves the salt of the parable in the Upanishads, covers the land
of Genesis and flows by the paradise of the Koran. And the random blur of
noise, the tumult of light at which I now stare is the author of more beauty
even than itself: cirrus and cumulus, rainbow and storm cloud, the strata of
sunset, the indescribable scent of the first rains on the summer-baked plains.
‘It is all in the water’: Scotch whiskey,
Longjing tea. The universal element, it is yet so particular about its local
excellences. It ‘benefits the myriad creatures’, yet the vehement loveliness of
the cataract is the cause of flood and death in the overburdened stream below.
Its substance yields to the guiding rocks, yet its form outlives the rocks that
direct and hinder its flow.
I will during my life be certain to drink
some molecules of the water passing this moment through the waterfall I see. Not
only its image will become a part of me; and its particles will become a part
not merely of me but of everyone in the world. The solid substances of the
earth more easily cohere to particular people or nations, but those that
flow--air, water--are communal even within our lives.”
From
Heaven Lake, Vikram Seth
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