Something Attempted, Something Done

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I don't have to repeat ad nauseam that I am an ardent admirer of my Guide SDM...all you have to do is to type SDM in my blogspot's Search Module and you will have at least a couple of hundred posts with his name in them.


But I can't call him handsome...





He was no Gregory Peck:







But there were moments when he exuded immense glee, rubbing his hands, narrating how he got it finally after a herculean effort, and said:


"Something Attempted, Something Done"

At that moment his face looked radiantly handsome and it was a pleasure to watch his childlike triumphal gestures.


There is no ugliness in Nature. 

And none in human faces either when they talk about something that interests and excites them like that "Keats shouting with delight as some passage of especial energy struck his imagination" that I was talking about the other day.


In the 1960s at KGP there was for a short while a Lecturer in the EE Dept. He was about 5 years older to me and was of average height, average weight, average complexion, but his all hair went prematurely gray, he had protruding teeth, and certainly not handsome as the term goes. He never did his Ph D but all his students were unanimous that he was the best young teacher in EE. And I had the good fortune of making friends with him. And at that time I was trying to learn and teach Circuit Analysis to our Physics students...a backbone awfully neglected in our popular Electronics books but very nicely dealt with in EE books like LePage and Seely.


And whenever I got stuck I used to go to his room or canteen and ask him to explain to me some concept that baffled me. And it was lovely to watch his face beam and turn beautiful as he talked excitedly about what he knew like the back of his hand. And he was very widely read outside his subject too. In fact it was he who asked me to buy and read that paperback in Thackers called Three Men in a Boat...I must have read it half a dozen times since. And he warned me not to read any other book by Jerome K Jerome...saying it would be a disappointing come-down.

Coming back to the SDM quote above, the other day I found it also quoted by Bertie Wooster, of all people...he must have picked it up from his Jeeves:

"If I ever felt that something attempted, something done had earned a night's repose, it was when I got back to my flat and shoved my feet up on the mantelpiece and started to absorb the cup of tea which Jeeves had brought in..." 

And that made me Google it. And I discovered that it occurs in Longfellow's poem, The Village Blacksmith. Here is the relevant stanza:

Toiling,--rejoicing,--sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose.

SDM mentioned that it occurs in Jim Corbett...very likely...but I couldn't locate it.


Talking of Village Blacksmiths, I guess none of my readers save perhaps my learned cousin Prof GMK (the one who gave me a lasting lesson in the metallurgy of tinning, and eutectic alloys) has ever seen the really huge bellows made of what looked like buffalo-skin. There was a rope attached to it and a worker was hired to pull it up and down...like a gigantic bicycle pump:







 http://www.fholder.com/Blacksmithing/article9.htm


 I am no blacksmith....but I am a blogsmith alright.


I know very well the everyday feeling:

Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose

Good Night!

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