The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  However, he did establish a lasting bond with his British assistant, Leonard Elmhirst (1893–1974), half his age, who was instantly attracted by what he saw lurking behind Tagore’s dignified presence. ‘The eyes perpetually lit up with gleams of humour, almost of mischief. This was no mystic sage. This was no gatherer of disciples, but a very human, human being . . . There was no aspect of human existence which did not exercise some fascination for him.’ And Tagore wrote: ‘I think you are the only one who closely came to know me when I was young and old at the same time.’ Elmhirst said: ‘I have sometimes found myself describing you as the most lonely of men. This seemed to be the inevitable penalty of true greatness.’ Nevertheless, ‘So often you cared for me like a father, so often we laughed together like children.’ Tagore responded: ‘I shall always remember you not merely as a friend but as a sharer in the intimacy of a joint creation.’ Elmhirst had come to work for Tagore, paying his own fare, and with no prospect of a salary, inspired by a brief meeting to apply his agricultural training to the revitalisation of an impoverished Indian village; and he then set up the Dartington educational and agricultural experiment in England, combining the ideals of the two men, a monument to optimism that radiates Tagore’s influence to this day, and one as significant as the utopian factory created in New Lanark by Robert Owen (1771–1858). It was a partnership that transcended time: Tagore wrote, ‘The old is old and the young is young, and it is very seldom that the twain truly meet. But I am sure that we did meet.’ They were a ‘couple of the mind’, who demonstrated how practical collaboration between quite different personalities could bear fruit of a kind neither could have imagined on their own. It was also a partnership that illuminates the role of private sensitivities in the shaping of public events.

  There has been an important change in how these sensitivities have been expressed. Traditionally, ‘honour’ was of supreme importance. Aristocrats wanted public recognition of their superiority, and devoted most of their energy to proving it by practical demonstrations of military prowess, ostentatious displays of wealth, generosity or hospitality. Less privileged people struggled to win the accolade of respectability, independence and honesty. The fragility of public reputation still haunts most lives, but a revolt against submission to the opinions of others has made people worry more about their own self. The less confident they become, the easier it is for them to misinterpret their experiences.

  When a male and a female produce a child, they bring someone into the world who mixes their characteristics in unpredictable ways and with whom neither parent can be in total agreement. It is the same with ideas, which are born of mixed and sometimes unknown parentage. Humans have never yet created something out of nothing. The best they can do is to procreate, which requires a partner, an inspiration, a meeting with another, at the very least. They are alive so long as they are acquiring knowledge, which is a process of disagreeing with oneself. That is a preparation for going beyond the ambition to love everybody, and the problem of disagreeing with most people. Compatibility can keep couples warm, but their incompatibilities can also make them sparkle and glow.

  Tagore said, ‘I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own.’ I am grateful to him for making it possible for me to imbibe some of his experience, and through him to have been given a privileged glimpse of India’s unique but multiple traditions, and the subtlety of the answers it offers. If I had met him in person, as Bertrand Russell did, I might have been put off, as he was, by a feeling that there was a barrier between us, as happens in most brief encounters, but Tagore’s books and letters are such intimate self-portraits of his many personalities in contact with a huge variety of characters and situations, showering me with new questions and making me think afresh about familiar ones, that I feel I have established a memorable relationship with him. He will never know it but he is not dead to me.

  Nations have equipped their citizens with birth certificates and passports to prove that they are alive, but without giving any hint as to what life means to each one in terms of suffering and joy. Bertrand Russell reacted almost allergically to a fraction of Tagore’s peculiarities, which distracted him from discovering many other qualities. It is in this way that small events produce big results. Tagore and Elmhirst put aside their different backgrounds and discovered what each could give the other. Instinctive repulsions are the main reason why so many people fail to appreciate one another; they jump to conclusions from the first piece of evidence they encounter. This is a universal human response, and many pride themselves on being able to make accurate, intuitive, instant judgements. But there is another reaction that is slower, based on the belief that it is possible to discover something new each time two beings meet in situations, moods, conversations or challenges which reveal a different voice or mask. Receptivity is an openness to surprise and a willingness to be proved wrong. It can be dangerous, which is why reading history is a safe way of practising: it reminds me that I do not know everything and never will; it warns me that I do not need to take disagreement as a personal insult, and it rewards me sometimes with droplets of the detachment that unfamiliar encounters demand.

  I am uncomfortable on the see-saw of routine exchanges, which carefully avoid anything controversial. Dictators protect themselves from controversy by trying to annihilate disagreement, though it then festers underground and grows more bitter. Libertarians respect disagreement and coddle it, which may allow new thoughts to sprout, but also the same disagreements to survive, and the same themes to be endlessly debated, When Tagore described an ancient monument – the Taj Mahal, built by the emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666) in memory of a deeply loved wife, prematurely deceased – as ‘a tear drop on the face of eternity’, he showed how poetry can shift the perspective and liberate the imagination. Thinking that involves inventing hypotheses and chasing and unravelling evidence likewise channels the imagination away from old disputes towards unexpected targets. ‘Thinking is the hardest work there is,’ said Henry Ford, ‘which is probably why so few engage in it’. But it can be as intensely absorbing, as exhilarating and as relaxing as play.

  Tagore was able to achieve what he did to a considerable extent because he was born into one of India’s most broadly cultured families, interested in everything that was normally out of bounds – pioneers of women’s education and of religious reform, founders of the first theatre in Calcutta, introducers of the orchestra into Indian music, combining Hindu, Muslim and European civilisations, and speaking half a dozen Eastern and Western languages. He imbibed courage from the originality of almost every relative. His exposure to the literatures of the whole world enabled him to separate the indigestible husk of Britain’s colonial oppression from the inner nourishment of its culture, drama, poetry and what he called its ‘large-hearted liberalism’. Most people without such a background have to grow their own surrogate family to inspire them, and they can continue to grow it all their lives. But the Britons who governed India very rarely had any idea of the breadth and depth of the culture of the sub-continent’s elites, who had the advantage that their minds were stocked not with one culture, but with both Indian and British memories, and indeed with several historical and regional cultures too. Few Britons could understand how Tagore coupled the inspiration he got from his Vedic ancestors with modern thinking, so that he was able to say that ‘in religion as in the arts what is common for a group is of no importance’. The coupling of civilisations has never had predictable results. What the East has borrowed from the West has included as many rotten as fruitful ideas, while in plundering the East the West has distorted or oversimplified the spiritual messages it brought back. What is distinctive about Tagore is that when he spoke of unity he accepted that it would and should contain contradictory opinions: his ideal was an ‘eternal symphony played on innumerable instruments’, but with no room for ‘the pomp and pedantry of pontiffs and pundits’. His spirituality was based not on rigid beliefs but on indivi
dual experience, and yet, at the same time, ‘separateness’ was unbearable to him because it produced ‘a fearful loneliness’.

  In 1913, almost unknown outside his own country, Tagore was suddenly and passionately embraced by the taste-makers of Western literature as a kindred soul and awarded the Nobel Prize just six months after the publication of the English translation of his Bengali poems. Then, only a few years later, when the traumas of the First World War gave birth to new preoccupations, his most fervent admirer dismissed him as a pedlar of ‘sentimental rubbish’. The ebb and flow of his reputation, between fame and near oblivion, is a good illustration of how memories are reinvented to suit transient moods. But disagreements are born not only from changing memories but also from memories that refuse to go away: Tagore was flummoxed by the Indian peasants who were his contemporaries and whom he tried to cajole into collective grass-roots experiments and greater efficiency: he asked why they resisted, why they ‘do so little for themselves’; and they replied: Why should they change? The landlord would benefit, not them. They lived in a different time zone, while he, the glory of the Bengali Renaissance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, suffered from the same sense of isolation as the artists of the Italian Renaissance. In the next chapter, I shall investigate whether a new understanding of the passing of time might make it more likely that disputes could be turned into enlightenment.

  [11]

  How else can one think about the future, apart from trying to predict it or worrying about it?

  THE TWO NOBEL PRIZE-WINNERS Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and Rabindranath Tagore once had a much publicised conversation, but it was ‘a complete non-meeting of minds’. Einstein was as dedicated as Tagore to the idea of the reconciliation of civilisations, and of humans too. He joined with thirty-three of the world’s most eminent scientists in a manifesto proposing that scholars of all branches of knowledge should combine to ‘bring forth a comprehensive world view’. He supported the One World Movement, declared himself (during the First World War) to be a European; and in 1935 urged Arabs and Jews to ‘peaceable and friendly cooperation’.

  The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, containing his writings, correspondence, speeches and interviews, which are still in the process of being published and will fill twenty-five large volumes, reveal an individual with an encyclopaedic curiosity. But in matters of daily life he was no better than anyone else when it came to making predictions about the future. He acknowledged as much: when invited to become president of Israel he declined, saying that he had ‘neither the natural ability nor the experience to deal with human beings’.

  He was far from certain that there would be more mutual understanding in the future: ‘Specialisation in every sphere of intellectual work’, he said, ‘is producing an ever-widening gulf between the intellectual worker and the non-specialist’, and he half-jokingly added: ‘Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.’ And very few imagined that his calculations could ever make a difference to their own future. The London Times denounced his ideas as ‘an affront to common sense’. The Archbishop of Canterbury said that he could make ‘neither head nor tail of his theories’ and that ‘the more he listens and reads on the subject, the less he understands’.

  It took a long time for anyone to realise that Einstein was creating a totally new understanding of the future, partly because he suggested that he was really more interested in the past. ‘What really interests me,’ he said, ‘is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.’ In other words, was there a disagreement at the origin of the universe, two or more incompatible options? When Cardinal O’Connor of Boston attacked the theory of relativity as atheistic, Rabbi Goldstein of New York sent Einstein a telegram: ‘Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words.’ Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.’ It was not too reassuring, either to the Rabbi or the Cardinal, to find Einstein attached to seventeenth-century ideas: Spinoza had been excommunicated from his synagogue in 1656 for being sceptical about organised religion and for being obstinately independent in rejecting all dogma and all idea of God as being distinct from nature; Spinoza even preferred to live in poverty rather than accept the constraints of a professorship offered to him by Heidelberg University. Einstein wrote a lot about Spinoza, and indeed composed a poem about him: Spinoza’s Ethics, he said, ‘will have a permanent effect on me’. He called himself ‘a deeply religious unbeliever’ – neither on one side nor on the other. Einstein lived neither in the past nor in the future, but outside time. Total absorption in scientific study gave him an ‘inner freedom and security’ from the aspects of ordinary life that he found uninteresting or unacceptable, nourishing in him ‘a state of feeling similar to that of a religious person or a lover’, with ‘a simplified and lucid image of the world’. Others saw him as ‘a queer mixture of great warmth and great aloofness’. He himself said that ‘at the threshold of life I felt like a pariah kept on the side-line, disliked and abandoned by everybody.’ When he made his first great discoveries he was very much a young man rejecting the ideas of his elders. Even when he was in his forties and world-famous, a journalist wrote: ‘The impression is one of disconcerting youth, strongly romantic, and at certain moments evoking in me the irrepressible idea of a young Beethoven . . . and then suddenly laughter breaks out and one sees a student.’ Einstein was irreverently witty and a ‘kindly twinkle . . . never ceased to shine in his eye even through the sternest run of the argument.’ He liked his own room to be in a complete mess, and refused to allow any cleaner or even his wife to tidy it: ‘If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, of what then is an empty desk?’ ‘To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.’ ‘It is a strange thing to be so widely known and yet to be so lonely.’ ‘Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?’

  He did not try to fulfil the expectations of others. ‘To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me. Such an ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty.’ ‘I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, or my circle of friends, or even to my own family.’ Marriage he defined as ‘the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident’, and he said he was ‘scared away from marriage by fear of becoming a contented bourgeois’. Competition was ‘an awful kind of slavery no less evil than the passion for money or power’. He did not drink alcohol and was a vegetarian ‘in principle’, eating meat ‘with a guilty conscience’. ‘I like neither new clothes nor new kinds of food.’ He did not like his face either: ‘If it weren’t for this moustache, I’d look like a woman.’ When he said ‘Very few women are creative’, he revealed not only that he was born in 1879, but that his brain was an archaeological site for very ancient prejudices as well as a fountain of bright new ideas.

  ‘I am happy,’ he said, ‘because I want nothing from anyone. I do not crave praise. The only thing that gives me pleasure, apart from my work, my violin and my sail boat, is the appreciation of my fellow workers.’ But while maintaining cordial relations with them, he expressed strong doubts about the place being given to randomness and the subjectivity of truth in quantum physics. ‘I am firmly convinced of the harmony of the universe . . . Everything is determined. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.’ Alternative explanations were a ‘tranquillising philosophy,’ comparable to religion; Niels Bohr (1885–1962) – who believed in complementarity rather than unity and whose motto was ‘opposites are complementary’ – was ‘a talmudic philosopher [who] doesn’t give a hoot for the “reality” which he regards as a hobgoblin of the naïve’. Einstein insisted that randomness would eventually be explained by a deeper level of determinism; it was ‘unbearable’ that space and time, electric and magnetic forc
es, energy and mass could not be unified in a single picture; and he devoted his later years, in vain, to unifying quantum physics and gravity.

  Tagore and Einstein had this in common, that they both felt isolated and misunderstood, with their ultimate ambitions unfulfilled, and this was partly due to their attitude to time. Tagore, who deliberately derived inspiration from many different epochs, was ‘out of sync’ with contemporaries who preferred to stay put with their habits in their own time zones. The most relevant idea produced by Einstein for the conduct of daily life is that ‘the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion’, which placed him outside the frontiers of what most people believe to be common sense. If you or I were conversing with them, we would have to respond by explaining our own attitude to time, which is ultimately our most precious possession, life itself. I shall do this, in the hope that it will provoke you to explain the time frame within which you place your own existence, in effect your philosophy of history. There are plenty of ready-made philosophies of history to choose from, based for example on progress, exploitation, happiness, immortality, individuality or sexuality, and they often imply that a human is thrown into a stormy sea at birth, and spends years clambering onto a succession of leaky lifeboats, carried along uncontrollably towards an unknown seashore, or sometimes with no shore ever in sight, knowing only that one is doomed eventually to drown. I am not myself attracted to any of these philosophies, because they look forward to a future that is much like the present: more prosperity, more gadgets, more holidays, more catastrophes, more ailments, more therapies.