The Story of My Experiments With Truth

By -
The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Gandhi's Autobiography), by Mohandas Gandhi

Experience has taught me that civility is the most difficult part of Satyagraha.  Civility does not here mean the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion, but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent good.
I read Gandhi's autobiography for the first time when I was about 18, and I loved it.  I whipped through it in three days (which is unbelievable to me now).  So when I made up my Classics Club list, I put it on as a re-read, thinking it would be nice to re-visit a book I don't really remember too much about.

Gandhi wrote this in installments for a weekly publication, and all the chapters are quite short.  It must have taken several years.  He starts with his childhood, especially his struggles with dietary and religious questions, and goes through to cover the development of his satyagraha philosophy and its application in several early instances.  Salt came up, and the beginnings of spinning and weaving, but he does not get all the way to the independence movement or anywhere close to it.

I was surprised to see how very much there is about diet.  I got quite bogged down about two-thirds of the way through in a seemingly endless series of chapters on diet, which got more and more ascetic until he was giving up salt (a bad idea, I think!) and living solely on fruits and nuts.  He also extolled an ideal of complete abstinence in marriage.  Gandhi was also interested in experiments with communal living and farming, so there was quite a bit about various endeavors with that. 

The political and historical stuff was great, though.  Just fascinating, and I wished he had written more on those topics and the development of the independence movement.

I still enjoyed this book a lot, but now, of course, I'm more engaged with what it all meant at the time, so I understand it much better.  




Comments

  1. CleoFebruary 25, 2015 at 9:16 AM

    This one is coming up in the Well-Educated Mind Biography readings, I believe. I'm looking forward to it. I have a feeling I'm going to like many of Gandhi's ideas.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ruth @ with freedom and booksFebruary 26, 2015 at 7:05 AM

    Yeah, we have to read this later (WEM). Not necessarily looking forward to this; however, now that you add the political and historical aspect, I this that does interest me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanFebruary 26, 2015 at 7:52 AM

    I think both of you would really a like a lot of what he has to say.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more