"We cannot call our faults our own: they are invented for us by parents and schoolmasters and the makers of law." --Aubrey Menen

Aubrey Menen & M.Krishnan Nair

If Dostoevsky, Milan Kundera, Coetzee, O.V.Vijayan…are favorite authors, who is Aubrey Menen, a teacher? 

Whatever, I should note here that without the late Malayalam critic M.Krishnan Nair (his column in a Malayalam news magazine) I would perhaps have never read Aubrey Menen. Just as without Kundera it's doubtful whether I would have read Chamoiseau. About Chamoiseau later.

Now, from  Aubrey Menen’s, The Space Within The Heart (p-94)

“Our true self is not superior to other people; it is not inferior either. It is not touched by other people at all. It does not wish other people to be better, or to be worse; it neither punishes nor praises. It can be totally indifferent to the world, as if sleeping; or it can awake and observe, but with the same indifference.

‘Not that, not that,’ say the Upanishads, in the puzzling phrase which has echoed down the centuries. Now I saw its meaning. I was not that; nor anything that you could name in the world around me. I was not good, or bad; I was not a son, or a friend, or an uncle, or a cousin. I was not a success, or a failure. I was not even a middle-aged man in a room in Piazza Farnese seeking to answer a Pope. I was perfectly free of all such things because I had always been free. The world had not made me. It had merely thought it had.”

From J.M.Coetzee, Youth (p-10)

“Besides, who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can he know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure?

Things are rarely as they seem: that is what he should have said to Jacqueline. Yet what chance is there she would have understood?