Dictionary

I bought a Sanskrit-English dictionary online from Powells.com. When I got it this week, I realized it's going to be almost useless to me. It's only Sanskrit-English, with no English-to-Sanskrit section, and all the Indic words are in the Devanagari script, which I do not read. By the typeface it looks to be an older book, possibly 19th century, originally published in India and reprinted in the 1990s in England.

Still, it's fascinating, and I find myself sitting up at night, thumbing through it, scanning the columns of strange script and familiar definitions. A dictionary half in an unknown language is a fountain of inspiration. Delightful connections are expressed there, along with conceptions that convince me that, in ancient India, the world had a civilization that has hardly been matched in subtlety and sophistication.

• A man who does not cook for himself; a bad cook [a term of abuse].
  
• A mouse; a miser.
  
• Licked; surrounded.
  
• m. A bee; a scorpion. f. A woman's female friend.
  
• A whirlpool, a crowded place.
  
• Inaccessible; unfit for sexual intercourse; difficult to understand.
  

There are whole sermons and life lessons in a single word:

• Repentance, intense enmity, close attachment.
  
• Fire; appetite; gold.
  
• A great danger; a desperate act.
  
• Supported; haughty; near; obstructed.
  
• Touched; violated; judged; endured.
  
• Relaxation; independence.
  

There are mysteries fit to be taken whole as a poem by Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams, or to inspire a Borges ficcione:

• A benediction; a serpent's fang.
  
• Homeless, imperishable.
  
• Ungovernable; necessary.
  
• Painting figures on the body; feathering an arrow.
  

I meet words I wish I had; that is, words for which there is no single word in English that covers the same territory:

• Pleasure arising from sympathy.
  
• One who has suppressed his tears.
  
• An illustration of a thing by its reverse.
  
• A practice not usually proper to the caste but allowable in time of distress.
  
• A figure of speech dependent on sense and not on sound.