Excerpts from Raja Rao's talk, The writer and the word:
... Triple are the constituents of a book - the word, the author, the reader. The word which says what the author has to indicate, and the reader has to apprehend, seems to be the one element we seem to neglect, as if it were something we know so well that we may not investigate its nature, its function, its end. For the word, like every constituted thing, seems to have birth, a life-span, and a death ...
... It is just the same way that you feel you will live for ever, though your life span might be seventy or eighty years. The feel that you are everlasting demands that everything be everlasting. Hence the demand that the word be eternal. If man is eternal, so is the word ...
... he who says the word enunciates the word, and he who hears it has to have the eternal part awakened in him so that there could be right communication. If the transient speaks to the transient it becomes a cacophony. But if eternal, the unchanging, speaks to the unchanging, in me, in you, we have one language ...
... Therefore my argument is, unless you, the writer, could go back to the changeless in yourself, you could not truly communicate with the reader, if at that level the reader exists truly, then the question: who speaks to whom would not arise at all ...
... It is my conviction (basing myself on my Indian background) that you cannot really communicate unless you have no desire to really communicate ...
... Unless the author becomes an upasaka and enjoys himself in himself (which is Rasa) the eternality of the sound (Sabda) will not manifest itself, and so you cannot communicate either - so the word here becomes nothing but a cacophony ...
... The word indeed is eternal ...
... The word is but vibrant silence compounded into a momentary act. The act has to be like prayer if it should yield what you want it to yield. Even to say a flower, you must be able to say it in such a way that the force of the vocable, has the potency to create the flower. Unless the word becomes mantra no writer is a writer, and no reader a reader ...
... Thus we give sound back to silence and the seemingly divided remains undivided ...
