COMEDY CONTENT CANT BE REPEATED

Olding. 

I Won’t Tell My Life Story When Someone Asks, “How Are You?”

It’s a rhetorical question—barely even a question at all! And nobody really wants to hear about stiff joints and indigestion—or worse—in response. I will remember the best answer to this question is almost always, “Fine, thanks, and you?”

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The passages in which Krishna speaks about himself are so splendid that a few short examples will suce. First, a passage of great delicacy, where the poet’s love for the most fundamental elements in human life shines through his philosophical disdain for “this sad, vanishing world”:

I am the taste in water,

the light in the moon and sun, the sacred syllable Ôm

in the Vedas, the sound in air.

I am the fragrance in the earth,

the manliness in men, the brilliance in re, the life in the living,

and the abstinence in ascetics.

I am the primal seed within all beings, Arjuna:

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the wisdom of those who know,

the splendor of the high and mighty. (7.8–10)

Next, in the wonderful ninth chapter, a passage that starts by seeing Krishna as all parts of the sacricial rite and expands until he is not only all parts of the cosmos but even vaster than the category of “being”:

I am the ritual and the worship,

the medicine and the mantra,

the butter burnt in the re,

and I am the ames that consume it.

I am the father of the universe

and its mother, essence and goal

of all knowledge, the rener, the sacred Ôm, and the threefold Vedas.

I am the heat of the sun,

I hold back the rain and release it; I am death, and the deathless,

and all that is or is not. (9.16–19)

And from chapter 8, this startling quatrain, which seems to move at the speed of light, breathless with adoration:

Meditate on the Guide,

the Giver of all, the Primordial

Poet, smaller than an atom, unthinkable, brilliant as the sun. (8.9)

The long passages in which Krishna describes himself are extraordinarily moving. They keep brimming over with love and boldness. Krishna’s rst-person pronoun is a resplendent act of the human imagination: it is the poet himself speaking as God so that he can speak about God. His love here is so intense and intimate that