Dead Poets Society

I recently got the movie I wanted to see for a long time now: "Dead Poets Society".
The movie stars Robin Williams as the English teacher John Keating in a high school, of which he was also a student once.
While the essence of the movie is "Carpe Diem!!" a Latin phrase for "Sieze the day", and as the teacher Keating further says.."Make your lives extra-ordinary", the movie gives you more than that. Message to young, do only that what you LOVE the most. Message on the pedagogy, FREEDOM (as in THINKING for one's self) is more important than DISCIPLINE (as in being dogmatic) while educating the "growing minds". Message to the parents, don't DEMAND your children to DREAM your DREAMS. But don't you worry, it is not that a serious movie, there's a lot of fun there too. I bet you'll remember your high-school or college days too!!
The other characters of the students are also very interesting and all the actors have done very impressive drama.
I loved the movie and my favorite character was of "Charles Dalton", apart from John Keating of course.
Anyway this is not a review of the movie, go watch it yourself, if you come across it or if you don't forget that there was a Drama wonderfully made for English movie-watchers. My point of writing this blog is to capture some inspiring moments of my otherwise wasteful life.

This is how I got to know about this movie: first, it started when I read a "quotation" in a news paper : "Seize the day, make your lives extra-ordinary", like about a decade ago. After a while I
researched some on Internet and found that "Dead Poets Society" is a movie and in that the actual members of this society, students in a school, used to have clandestine meetings, (as adventurous as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer's) and their every meeting used to start with a quote from Henry David Thoreau. The one they show in the movie is:
"I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. "
This quote is read atleast three times on the screenplay and was absolutely perfectly dramatized with such a grace.
So it became my favorite even long before I saw the movie, because of HDT!!

Here are some interesting dialogue from the movie at IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097165/quotes


Also, in the movie, John Keating reads most of the poetic dialogue from Walt Whitman, whom once he also calls affectionately as "Uncle Walt".
I had, as evident from my previous poems including some posts on this blog, derived my inspiration from Walt Whitman, quite a few instances earlier.
I was reading his Leaves of Grass an year ago, when I first came to US. However due to time constraints I could not regularly read it. Recently I brought the book again from the library and started randomly reading the poems.

I found this one poem very very passionate and moving: it's called " Whoever You are, Holding Me now in Hand". You can find the full poem Online over here: http://www.bartleby.com/142/37.html

Here are a few lines I want to note here, before I again get busy and return the book to library and forget about how inspired I was:

Beginning from the beginning:

"WHOEVER you are, holding me now in hand,
Without one thing, all will be useless,
I give you fair warning, before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different. "

And then again:

"The way is suspicious—the result uncertain, perhaps
destructive; You would have to give up all else—I alone would expect
to be your God, sole and exclusive..."

"...possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of
the sea, or some quiet island, Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,..."

"Even while you should think you had unquestionably
caught me, behold! Already you see I have escaped from you. " ( this is the one I dwelled and swelled the most, with compassion to the poet, and feeling emotionally elated at the same time).

And lastly the concluding verses:

"Nor will my poems do good only—they will do just as much
evil, perhaps more; For all is useless without that which you may guess at
many times and not hit—that which I hinted at; Therefore release me, and depart on your way."

There it goes, I am glad I could capture these beautiful literary "joys" before they got lost in my more sublime trains of thoughts.

I am sure I have lost many such earlier, and who knows will lose many more in the future. But as long as possible, I will try to atleast capture them in my blog right here, which may perchance, look rich in retrospective.

I will end this post here with a little bit of my own, althought its INCOMPLETE, still dedicated to Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, the movie Dead Poets Society, and to all those real-life societies similar to the one in the movie, and to many of the dead poets, Keats, Wilde, Poe...and the list goes on:
"all dead poets have twisted souls
and in their graves they live forever
the dreams in their eyes will never
cease to turn into great works of art
or inspire the minds of the young at heart................"

--Siddartha Pamulaparty

Date: May 15, 2008.