Living Will

Transcript

00:00 Outlook brings to you excerpts from its latest issue titled "Love Virtually".

00:05 Ahead of Valentine's Day, Outlook's latest issue explores the many kinds of love,

00:10 from online dating for the youth and dating for the elderly,

00:14 to the otherworldly and unrequited love.

00:17 The issue also looks at how the concept of love has evolved

00:22 at a time when the divide between communities of different faiths is widened by politics.

00:28 "Living Will" by Chinkee Sinha, Editor, Outlook

00:32 A will is a love letter, a place of hope. A will is also an archive of longings.

00:39 Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.

00:43 It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.

00:47 By Mary Oliver

00:48 I'm a single woman. I don't have children. I don't own a house yet, or any land.

00:55 I spend all my money traveling and on collecting books, objects and furniture.

01:01 None of my furniture is in pairs. Everything is singular, like me.

01:06 I have begun to draft my will to protect my memories.

01:10 Everything must go like in that story called "Why Don't You Dance" by Raymond Carver,

01:16 in the book "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love".

01:20 The book lives in one of the shelves. In that story, an alcoholic man stands in his kitchen,

01:27 looking at his bedroom suite in his front yard.

01:30 He has put everything on sale after his estrangement from his wife.

01:34 In that story, the man says, "Everything must go."

01:39 In my case, everything includes kidneys, eyes, the Milagro cross that I got from a monastery in Big Sur in California,

01:48 where I spent days looking out at the ocean in silence, in the company of 13 Benedictine monks, the dream catcher, etc.

01:57 Not that in the general ordinariness of life, these objects I have collected stand out in terms of wealth,

02:04 but for me, they are precious because they contain stories.

02:09 Every night, I write the stories of these objects in my house,

02:12 just in case people who inherit these want to know how these things landed up in my house.

02:18 I am not sure if anyone would want any of these glass boxes with an old BlackBerry phone,

02:25 a voice recorder, a point and shoot camera, amongst other things.

02:29 But a will allows the possibility of storytelling.

02:33 Writing a book is a daunting task. A will with an annexure is doable.

02:38 All this is important information, at least to me.

02:42 As Mark Z. Daniel Weske writes in House of Leaves,

02:46 "What can I say? I am a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff,

02:53 which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon,

03:00 going unheralded, passings unmourned. Well, you get the drift."

03:05 For this and more, read the latest issue of Outlook.

03:09 clock.