Living on the Edge

When I was in college, my friend Justin gave me a copy of Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” because he felt that I would be able to relate to it. Justin’s was a turbulent friendship, filled with heady discussions, arguments, and an intense respect for each other’s passion, mine for writing, his for botany. As friendships so intense may sometimes suffer great moments of upheaval, so did ours. Now a successful academic botanist, I have been in touch with Justin sporadically, but will always be grateful for the books that he suggested, greatest amongst them was Maugham’s. In the last couple of weeks before coming to India, I re-read the copy that he had given me before I had moved to Belgium for the first time nearly 20 years ago. In the interim I had read it again, but rather cursory in attention, and had seen the absolutely horrible film version in which Bill Murray misses the role of Larry completely, but it has always stuck in the back of my mind, percolating.

When I re-read it then, I was in for quite a surprise. The accidental protagonist of the book is Larry. Everyone is worried about Larry and how he should live his life, because he just “wants to loaf.” This being the 1920’s and Americans should be grabbing the world by the balls and making buckets of money, but Larry just doesn’t seem to get it. He ends up living in Paris for a while in an undisclosed, yet presumably low-rent apartment loafing and reading books, teaching himself Greek and thinking about life. Meanwhile, the world is racing by, apparently leaving him far behind. Americans in Paris are making buckets of money back home and enjoying the high life that Paris can offer in all its pomp and circumstance. Until 1929, that is and the stock market comes crashing.

Larry, who had not made money, had no money to lose, save for a sum that he had squirreled away for maintenance. Among other things he is attempting to learn Greek, French, and read as much as he can, all the while loafing, being a drop-out in life, much to the disgust, chagrin, and frustrations of those who know better for him.

What I had not taken note of, as it meant nothing to me and I had forgotten, was that Larry ends up in Madura, the former name of Madurai, where he has a philosophical epiphany of sorts with regards to his deep exposure to Advaita Vedanta , more specifically, the concept of what is beyond Good and Evil. Sitting there in Antwerp at my favorite jazz cafe, De Muze, reading this and having booked my tickets for Madurai, I looked around to see if the Men in Black were watching me, feeling rather like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show.

Madurai has indeed challenged me on this front as well, and whether Justin was a prescient seer or if the book planted a dormant seed, or mere coincidence that I ended up here, for me is a mere curiosity. What I have found since I have been here is that the tenets of Advaita Vedanta Advaita Vedanta take on a rather different significance for me. One lives here on the edge of the razor, between an overload of the senses on one side and a resigned fatalism on the other. In Apocalypse Now,  Brando as Kurtz describes a dream that he has of a snail crawling along the edge of a razor, a straight razor’s edge. The frailty of the human condition against the backdrop of the indifference of Nature and Natural Law, for Kurtz is truly “the horror, the horror.” How does one live on this razor’s edge, on one side, Good, the other Evil, one side, Life, the other Death?

Teaching today about the concept of the non-Finite verbs to 11 and 12-year olds, I drew a timeline, indicating the past, present, and future and that these types of verbs were “out of time.” I saw their eyes widen with wonder at the concept of being “out of time,” which is actually quite prevalent in Indian philosophy as the idea of a “beginning, middle, or end” is pointless as time is even beyond Infinity, something akin to what Kant settles on in his Critique of Pure Reason. Pure Reason, with the precision of Occam’s Razor, is beyond our human capacity, beyond ever our capacity to conceive of it. It is the Face of God.