"Time refused to pass. Every moment seemed to have to be physically pushed forward....Began to read Anna Karenina, but it was so dreadful that I couldn't -- what is the point of reading these sorts of sickly books, I don't understand. I want writing that is quite simple, beautiful, sweet and generous -- a strange mess of a situation full of convoluted turns doesn't suit me for very long. Thankfully it began to rain heavily after a while. It felt good to shut everything on all sides and sit down by the glass window to watch the clouds and the rain. At one place the sight of a monsoon river was quite amazing. It had become swollen and enlarged, frothing, twisting, muddied, racing, banging its head against the stones upon which it flung itself, hitting and falling over them, leaping over and whirling around them, behaving most terribly. I've never seen such madness anywhere else. By the time we got to Sohagpur in the evening and had our dinner, the rain had stopped; when the train started I noticed the sun setting brilliantly among the clouds. I was thinking often of all of you, that for you time was passing unnoticed while you ate, played, studied and conversed -- time was flowing over you and you hadn't even noticed its presence -- and I was swimming through time, the entire expanse of time was hitting my face, my heart, my whole body..."
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"Our boat is moored to the front of a sandbank on the other side of Shilaidaha. It's a vast sandbank -- utterly desolate -- its limits cannot be seen -- just sometimes, in some places, the river's lines are visible -- while again, sometimes you could mistake the sand for the river -- no villages, no people, no trees, no grass -- for variety occasionally cracked wet earth, and in some places dry white sand -- if you turn your face towards the east you can see endless blue above and endless white below, empty sky and empty earth; a wretched, dry, hard emptiness underneath and a spirit-like, generous emptiness above. Such desolation isn't to be seen anywhere else. If you suddenly turn your face towards the west, you see the lap of a still, small river, tall banks on the other side, trees and bushes, huts, all looking like an amazing dream in the light of setting sun. Exactly as if on the one side you have creation and on the other annihilation. The reason for mentioning the light of the evening sun is that we normally go out for a stroll in the evening, and therefore it is that picture that remains etched on the mind. When is living in Calcutta one forgets how astonishingly beautiful this world is. It is only when you live here that you comprehend that this sun that sets every day among these peaceful trees by the side of this little river, and the hundred thousand stars that silently rise every night above this endless, ashen, lonely, silent sandbank -- what a surprisingly noble event this is. The sun, as it rises slowly in the east at dawn, opens a page in some tremendous book, and the evening gradually turns another enormous page in the sky from the west -- what an amazing script that too is -- and this barely flowing river and this sandbank spread across the edge of the world -- what sort of large, silent, deserted school is this!"
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"Is man an iron machine that he shall always run on schedule? Man's mind is a thing that functions in so many diverse ways -- it moves in so many directions -- and it has so many claims, that it must lean in one direction or the other. That is its life's aim, its sign of humanity, its protest against inertia. A person who does not have this hesitation, this weakness, is terribly narrow and hard and lifeless. Our life force is that we call propensity [prabrtii], which we are always criticizing in harsh language -- through our many joys and sorrows, good deeds and sins, this is what allows us to blossom towards the cosmic. If we completely disbelieve our inclination, we would make the same mistake as the river if it were to wonder at every step, 'Why, where is the ocean, there is only desert, forest and sandbank to be seen, perhaps the power that pushes me onward is taking me in the wrong direction.' We too are flowing every day through many apprehensions, we cannot see our end, but He who has given us, in this limitless life, the tremendous force called our propensity, He alone knows how to use that force to direct us. We always make the enormous mistake of thinking that we shall perhaps be abandoned in this place to which our propensity has brought us; we cannot know then that we shall be drawn out of that situation. The power that brings the river to the desert is the same power that takes it to the sea. What pushes us into our mistakes is the very thing that pulls us out again. This is how we move on. The person who doesn't have this propensity of his, or the plenitude of this life force, whose mind does not manifest its mystery and variety, that person may be happy, or good, and people may call that narrowness mental strength, but he has an inadequate stipend for this limitless life."
( A blossom is not really linear, logical. It is quite magical)
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"On the shore, many different sorts of people come and go in the most slow and sedate manner; why they come, why they go, why one sits hunched with his arms wrapped around his knees pulled up to his chest, why they stae surprised at nothing in particular -- one cannot be sure what any of this means. Only a few ducks display an air of being busy in the midst of this -- they make a lot of noise, frequently, excitedly dunking their heads in the water and immediately raising them again with a vigorous shake. Exactly as if they were sticking out their necks each time to investigate the deep mysteries under the water, then forcefully shaking their heads to say, 'No, nothing, nothing at all!' The days over here keep lying there, sunning themselves in this way for twelve hours, and in the remaining twelve hours they wrap themselves up in the deepest darkness and go silently to sleep."
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"A shadow has fallen over the entire never-ending field -- a tender melancholy -- not exactly tears -- like a deep trembling under the long eyelashes of an unblinking eye. One could imagine that mother earth lives with her own children and clamour and household work in the midst of society -- but where there's a little space, a little silence, a little bit of open sky, that's where her vast heart's hidden sadness and melancholy can appear; there, one can hear her deepest sigh. It is doubtful whether you'll find the sort of unobstructed clear sky and flat land spread out over such distances as we have in India anywhere in Europe. That is perhaps why our race has been able to discover the limitless melancholy of this vast world. That is why our Purbi and Tori ragas seem to express the inner lament of the entire vast world, not someone's domestic story. One part of this world is efficient, affectionate, limited -- that part hasn't found the time to influence us a great deal. But that part of the world which is unpeopled, empty and endless, that part has made us melancholy."
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A poet's prose is some of the best prose in the world. :) Rilke, Tagore, Keats, Brodsky, Borges - letters, notes.
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