Unless you come here you forget how amazingly beautiful the world is and what a large heart she has and how full of a deep fulfillment she is. In the evening when I sit quietly on the boat, the waters silent, the riverbank growing hazy, the sun's rays slowly losing their light on the margins of the sky, my whole body and mind feel such a touch -- strangely generous, large and incommunicable -- of silent nature with her downcast eyes! What peace, what affection, what greatness, what limitless tender melancholy! From these inhabited fields of crops to that desolate world of the stars, the sky fills to the brim from end to end with such a stunned heartfelt feeling, and I sit alone, immersed in this limitless mindscape -- only the maulabi stands next to me and jabbers on and on, making me disconsolate.
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The other day I read a sloka from Kalidasa in a paper that I was quite surprised to read - meaning 'Why is even the soul of a happy man rendered restless upon seeing a beautiful thing or hearing a sweet sound? It must be that he remembers, unbeknownest to himself, some friend from another life.' It's pretty apparent that Kalidasa's mind would sometimes be weighed down quite without reason. In the Meghdut too, the poet has said -- 'seeing clouds, even the happy person turns absentminded.' Beauty awakens in man the most deep and mysterious and limitless of desires, that attracts the mind and takes it from one birth to the next...
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I was walking as if I was the one and only last-remaining pulse of a dying world. And all of you were on another shore, on the banks of life -- where there's the British Government and the nineteenth century and tea and cheroots. If I could lift somebody out of there on a small boat and bring him here to this uninhabited moonlight, we would stand on this high bank and look out at the endless water and stand, and the fathomless night would shimmer and hum all around us! So many other have over the years stood here like me, alone, and felt this way, and so many poets have tried to express this, but oh, it is ineffable -- what is it, what is it for, what impulse is it, what does one call this lost peace, what does it mean -- when will that tune emerge, splitting open the heart precisely through the middle, which will exactly express this musicality!
*
You must be quite surprised to hear that I'm reading so much of Elements of Politics and Problems of the Future after coming here. Actually, the thing is, I can never quite find a poem or a novel that is appropriate for this place. Whatever I open has the same English names, English society, the roads and drawing rooms of London, and all sorts of meaningless complications. I never come across anything that is quite easy, beautiful, free or generous, brightly tender, and rounded like a teardrop. Just complications upon complications, analysis upon analysis -- just attempts at crumpling, wringing and scrunching up human nature to spin it around forcefully in order to prise out newer and newer theories or ethics. If I try to read that stuff, it shall completely muddy what I have here -- the calm current of this small summer-worn river, the flow of the indifferent breeze, the undivided expanse of the sky, the continuous peace of both shores and the silence all around. I almost never have anything to read that is appropriate for here, except for the shorter verses of the Vaishnava poets...quite simple and beautiful and peaceful -- full of a lot of sky, light, silence and tenderness!... In other places, people crowd around, they interrupt your flow of thought if they are in front of you, as if their very existence seem to nudge you; they are all, each and every one, a positive human being; but here they come and go and talk and work in front of you -- yet they do not push against your mind.
*
The universe has many paradoxes, one among which is that where there's an extensive landscape, endless sky, dense clouds, a deep feeling, in other words in a place where the eternal is manifest, there its appropriate companion can be only one person -- too many people make it too petty and messy. Infinity and one person are both evenly balanced in relation to one another -- both deserve to sit on their individual thrones face-to-face. ...If a person wants to spread out his entire soul, he needs too much space that there's no room for...
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-- Rabindranath Tagore, Letters from a Young Poet
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