Monday, August 25, 2008

An Unofficial Rose...













Photo by - Endevourme
The paragraph is from Iris Murdoch's "The Unofficial Rose". Randall, a character in this novel, cultivates roses in the countryside. He is leaving his farm for good and is standing on his farm,among the roses, for the last time before departing.

"...The old roses were at the height of their season, and Randall stood still among them, completely absorbed into a heaven of vision. There were moments when he knew that he loved nothing in the world so much as he loved these roses; and that he loved them with a love of such transcendent purity that they made him,for a moment, like to themselves. He could have knelt before these flowers, wept before them, knowing them to be not only the most beautiful things in existance but the most beautiful things concievable. God in his dreams did not see anything lovelier. Indeed the roses were God and Randall worshipped.
Moving slightly in the breeze the intense little heads surrounded him and drowned him in their odour. Lifting a few towards them he looked with his ever new amazement at the close packed patterns of petals, these formulae that Nature never forgot, those forms that were the most desirable of all things and so exquisite that it was impossible to carry them in belief and memory through the winter; so that every year one saw them as if for the first time and as they must have looked like in the Garden of Eden when in a felicitous moment God said: let there be roses..."

7 comments:

Junius said...

the pic is small wild flowers, they have a strange pattern :D

Gauri Gharpure said...

your blog introduces me to new songs and new authors of late. :) I loved the last few lines that ended with 'let there be roses'
the flowers are called Lantana.. They look wonderful, grow wild, but they are exotic.. Pose quite a threat to the native plants because of their highly proliferating, weedy nature...

Anonymous said...

Hi ,

I was reading ur blog posts and found some of them to be very good.. u write well.. Why don't you popularize it more.. ur posts on ur blog ‘Gulmohar’ took my particular attention as some of them are interesting topics of mine too;

BTW I help out some ex-IIMA guys who with another batch mate run www.rambhai.com where you can post links to your most loved blog-posts. Rambhai was the chaiwala at IIMA and it is a site where users can themselves share links to blog posts etc and other can find and vote on them. The best make it to the homepage!

This way you can reach out to rambhai readers some of whom could become your ardent fans.. who knows.. :)

Cheers,

Junius said...

#Gauri Gharpure
yea the plants are highly successful, thanks for the info :D

#ray
thanks!
:D!!

Anonymous said...

Ok Ende, I now know that you don't do tags (:P) but now I have awarded you with the Brilliante Weblog Award.

Check it out on my blog.

And keep posting :)

Ash said...

You know, I love wildflowers more than roses :-)

Lovely pic.

Junius said...

#shankari
Brilliante Weblog Award!!!
thanku thanku
lol :D

#Ash
yea me too, cause they are so exquisite!
thank yu!