Sindhu Shivaprasad

In a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rilke writes:

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to  love the questions themselves  like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the

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"At the end of Middlemarch George Eliot says of Dorothea that “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,” and that captures better than I can my convictions on this point. Diffusive is the key word: an influence that subtly spreads, perhaps... See more

The greatest waste of life lies in postponement: it robs us of each day in turn, and snatches away the present by promising the future. The greatest impediment to living is expectancy, which relies on tomorrow and wastes today.

Today’s huge levels of uncertainty – climate change, inflation, the nigh-impossibility of shared societal goals, the rampant polarisation making political moderation very difficult – have truly brought out the very worst in us. Yet if uncertainty is a feature of the world, and not just a story about the limits of human knowing, then we’d better

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The plight of all preoccupied people is wretched, but most wretched is the plight of those who labor under preoccupations that are not even their own, whose sleep schedule is regulated by somebody else's, who walk at somebody else's pace, and who are under instructions in that freest of all activities-loving and hating. If these people want to know... See more

Questions are also indications of directions of curiosity. They remind me of desire paths : pathways in the grass that emerge organically from people's natural patterns of movement instead of prescribed routes. They’re such a wonderfully human example of how we like to follow impulse and intuition to find the most direct (or appealing way) to get... See more

I recognize the irony here of describing understanding through words, and you being the person that’s internalizing it as knowledge. But with that said, therein lies the value of writing. Writing is an attempt to share your lived experience with others, which makes you face the blind spots in your own thinking in real-time. When you write, it... See more