  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. 
