Bhargav Varshney

Cut a chrysalis open and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly… No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

— Pat Barker

With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premi

... See more

Too many people think freedom is the ability to do anything you want, instead of the discipline to not be a slave to your compulsions.

“Writing is often the process by which you realize you do not understand what you are talking about.”

attention as inner ecology—and then, I could see ways that a holistic system was imperiled. I could see an inner landscape as a patch of thriving rainforest, a complex, interdependent ecology slashed back and stripped bare to accommodate the incursions of an export crop (and as we know, export crops don’t feed the locals). The long-rooted, sustaina... See more

If you want to create something but feel it has already been done 1000 times, remember: There is always room for quality.

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m... See more

Or do such Sisyphean philosophies—that “the road is life”—turn out to be bourgeois luxuries indulged by those safe enough to pretend this is all there is? Does the hunger and hope of the migrant show us something more fundamentally human? Maybe our craving for rest, refuge, arrival, home is a hunger that can’t be edited—the heart an obstinate palim

... See more