Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  Baṛ-dada isn’t satisfied until he has written his boxometry. Birendra writes on every wall and on every flowerpot on the second floor, drawing the sun and writing in the middle: ‘sun’—one can’t describe how painstakingly slowly he writes, rubbing it out so many times, and with so much care. God alone knows what particular happiness resides in the correct expression of that sun both for him and for the world. I too suffer from a similar madness, only the subject and the form are different. Those who are completely and entirely mad don’t know how mad they are. I know that I am crazy in one part—however much I want to or I try, I will not be able to tie that part down in this life; whatever my intelligible part pledges, my madness does not protect but destroys.

  130

  Shahjadpur

  10 July 1894

  One doesn’t want to lose sight of any part of the lives of those who are close to us and those whom we would always want to keep near us—but if you think about it properly, it’s funny in what little measure two people, even if they are very close, remain conjoined together in every line in this life. A person we have known for ten years—what a great part of those ten years have been spent not knowing him—perhaps if we do our accounts for a lifelong relationship we will find that we’re not left with very much in hand at the end. And that is only the knowing that comes of seeing; beyond that there’s the knowing of the mind. If you think about it like that then everybody appears unknown to you, and we realize that there is not much chance of getting to know anybody really well—because after a couple of days we will have to be completely separated, and that before us, countless millions of people have lived their lives under this sun and blue sky and met in rest houses and separated again and been forgotten and then removed. Thinking in this vein may make some of us want to renounce the world, and one may feel, ‘then why’—but in me, it’s just the opposite. I want to see more, know more, get more. Sometimes I think, here we are, just a few self-conscious living things who have raised their heads like bubbles floating in the ocean of life and have bumped into one another in a sudden coming together—and it is doubtful if the quantity of wonder, love and joy that has been created by this coming together will ever be built up again in all time. In one place in Basanta Ray’s poetry there is a line—

  In a moment we lose hundreds of centuries

  It’s quite true that man may experience the conjunction and disjunction of a hundred centuries in a moment. That is why one feels every moment is invaluable. The words aren’t new, but to me they seem so astonishingly new sometimes! This time before I left, on the day that S—— had come to Park Street in the afternoon, you were sitting at the piano, I was preparing to sing, when suddenly looking at you all I thought, here you were in the afternoon, your hair tied, wearing fresh clothes, on a particular cloudy day in front of an open window at the piano, and a person called me, standing, leaning upon the piano lid, S—— sitting and waiting to hear the songs—just a bit of astonishing business in the endless flow of events through time. It seemed that whatever beauty, whatever joy this contained was limitless, and that the light emanating on this cloudy afternoon was an amazing gain. I don’t know why the routine materiality of the everyday is sometimes suddenly torn a little for just a moment; then it seems to me that with my newborn heart I can see the scene in front of me and the present event reflected on the canvas of eternal time. Then the fact that you all are who you are and I am who I am—and that I’m looking at you and listening to you and thinking of you all as my own and you too are thinking of me as your own—comes to me again as an amazing thing that I can see in a new and vast way. Who knows if such an amazing occurrence will ever happen again! I quite frequently see life and this world in a certain way so that the mind is filled with limitless wonder—I may not be able to quite explain that to anybody else. That’s why a lot of things become so much for me that someone else may think it to be unnatural and excessive: ‘overreacting to every little thing’. One of the virtues of habit is that it manages to lighten and thereby lessen many things, protecting the mind from outside impact like a shield, but habit cannot ever completely envelop my mind—to me, the old seems to be new every day. That’s why my perspective gradually becomes different from other people’s, and I have to test with trepidation anew where each one of us is situated.

  131

  On the way to Calcutta

  13 July 1894

  We managed to enter the Ichamoti River. What a lovely, bright day it was! You couldn’t turn your eyes away from the scene on either side of the small river. There were hardly any clouds in the sky—the forests at the edge of the river and the dark green fields of crop happy in the sunshine, the breeze sweet—I sat like a king reclining comfortably on five or six pillows piled high on the bed next to the window—somebody had spun a dream upon my eyelids—the fishermen caught fish, women washed clothes, boys falling in the water created a rumpus, cows grazed, storks sat upon fields submerged in water, all of it looked like a picture. It’s impossible to try and describe exactly why all of it was feeling so wonderful to me. We say that a beautiful thing is like a dream for exactly the reasons that we say it is like a picture. Otherwise the saying is actually a bit strange—it wouldn’t be wrong to say that a picture was like a thing, but to say that something was like a picture is in one sense saying it the wrong way around. But the real meaning of it is that in a picture we see only one part of a thing that is held up before our eyes, so what becomes most intense in our minds is the pleasure we feel in partaking of the beauty of the scene. I feel that the function of Art is to carefully separate out that part of the world that we love from the rest to hold it up in its brightness, undiluted and on its own. The artist’s job is to strain that part out from the surface of truth and then put it on view. That’s why I feel that pure art is in pictures and music—not in literature. Man’s language is far more voluble than man’s paintbrush or his voice, which is why in literature we mix in too many things—in order to express beauty we give information or advice, and say many other things. Anyway, we use phrases such as ‘like a picture’, ‘like a song’, ‘like a dream’ very frequently—but that’s not the important thing. We think of beauty as more heavenly than truth, delight more heavenly than knowledge….

  But over here my boat is not advancing any further. We had come this way trusting that the wind that had obstructed us on the Yamuna would be favourable for us on the Ichamoti. But to trust in the wind is not a very intelligent thing to do. People have divided madness into forty-nine classes and named them the forty-nine winds. And, truly, among the five elements, wind contains a level of madness in excess of almost any other.

  132

  Calcutta

  15 July 1894

  How shall I describe the beauty of what I saw when the steamer left the Ichamoti behind and came upon the Padma towards evening? You couldn’t see the ends of the horizon anywhere—there were no waves, everything was full of a calm seriousness. When that which can whimsically create a storm right now takes on a beautiful and pleased aspect, when it hides its huge force and power in a form full of sweetness and dignity, then its beauty and glory come together to create the most amazing and generous wholeness! Slowly as the twilight gathered density and the moon rose, all the chords seemed to begin to resound in my entranced heart.

  133

  Calcutta

  16 July 1894

  Going up to the just-waking second-floor room, I saw my youngest hatchling lying on the bamboo mat on the floor trying to call out. The thing is almost exactly as it was before, its cheeks as plump, eyes gawking in the same silly way, head nodding and bobbing up and down on the shoulders all the while. All in all, the tiny person was like a dewdrop trembling upon the lotus of the vast world. I picked her up on my lap. At first for a while she seemed to be trying to recall her previous acquaintance with me—a thorough review was conducted while looking me up and down in a significant way. Sometimes, for no particular reason, an occasional sweet smile appeared. Gradually
, in no time at all, she began to lay her soft fat hands with their sharp nails upon my nose, face, eyes, hair, moustache and beard—in fact, on whatever she could find in front of her, and not only that, she then began to roar and try to put my nose and eyes into her mouth to eat it all up. After that, lying flat on her stomach on the bed, fat hands and legs waving and head bobbing about, she began to swim enthusiastically for a while. Among the changes I observed, it seemed that she has managed, with a lot of effort, to start pronouncing the consonants in the ‘p’ group nowadays, and that a little bit of intelligence has found expression in her eyes. She recognizes the sound of her own name and manages to recognize some of her friends and relatives as well. The smell of her body too has the same baby-baby feeling. Most of my time after returning to Calcutta has been spent in laughter-filled conversations with her.

  134

  Calcutta

  19 July 1894

  It’s impossible to get any work done because of Meera, Bob…. When this tiny personality lies flat on the bed and raises both her legs up to the sky as if they were the most precious commodities and then tries to put them into her own mouth, shouting out—aah baah baah baah—in the loudest voice, then it is absolutely impossible for me to get any reading or writing or any work done at all. I lie down flat on my stomach next to her somewhere, and she stretches out both her arms, flailing around, and begins a great commotion with my moustache, beard, hair, nose, ears, spectacles and watch-chain, getting increasingly excited and starting to yell. So my time passes in this way. Some days in the night I can hear her wake up and start to make all sorts of sounds—the moment I go near her, she gives me a bit of a smile; the thought is: now I’ve got someone to play with. Then there’s no sleep for a long time, as she lies flat on her stomach and keeps swimming around on the bed.

  135

  Calcutta

  21 July 1894

  I have a great desire to have somebody who can sing or play an instrument live near my room. If Beli becomes a maestro in both Indian and English music then perhaps my desire will be fulfilled to some extent. But by the time she becomes a maestro, she will leave my house. The other day when Abhi was singing I thought to myself that man’s happiness is constituted of materials that are not all that inaccessible—a sweet voice for singing is not an absolutely impossible ideal in the world, yet the pleasure it gives is very deep. But however easily available it might be, finding the appropriate amount of time for it is very hard. The world is not made up only of those who wish to sing and those who wish to listen; the maximum number of people all around us are those who will never sing and never listen to any singing. That’s why, taken all in all, it’s something that never happens; day after day passes, one’s soul becomes increasingly thirsty, the world seems to turn into worn skin and bone. I often think that it’s true that we’re sorry when our larger desires remain unfulfilled, but the dissatisfaction of our smaller needs and desires remaining unfulfilled all the time makes our inner selves, unbeknownst to ourselves, become gradually shrivelled and dry—we don’t always count those losses, but they’re not a negligible amount. When the soul is denied nourishment and remains neglected and starved, it becomes really difficult for it to bear our sorrows. I know that the way I am makes me want song, art, beauty, the company of thinkers, literary discussion—but in this country these are futile desires, futile striving on my part. People here cannot even begin to believe that things like these are absolutely essential for anybody. I too slowly begin to forget that almost none of the roots that feed my self are getting any nutrition. In the end, when suddenly one day some little source of nourishment becomes available, and I feel the intensity of my eager heart, I remember that all these days I was starving, and that this is an essential requirement for my temperament to continue to live.

  136

  Calcutta

  1 August 1894

  Somebody called Sharatchandra Ray had come to meet me, but I refused to see him. Once you let a Bengali’s son into your rooms, it becomes near impossible to oust him. But the Bengali daughter Meera is also no less than anybody—she too, once she enters my rooms with a clamour, doesn’t leave in a hurry. She mauls me with her paws and dances on my breast, and then, having messed up my beard, moustache, the parting of my hair, my writing notebooks, the plots of my stories and the continuity of my thoughts with her two tiny hands, is expelled from my room leaving me completely defeated. And the problem is that if she doesn’t come to me then I have to go to her—she begins to shout from the next room—anybody nearby who hears the loud shouting abandons all their work and rushes towards the sound—and once they are there, they see this plump, fat figure lying on her stomach in the middle of the huge bed thumping the pillows and hollering with unnecessary joy. The moment she sees the newly arrived person, her face is illuminated with a smile; sometimes she opens her mouth as wide as she can to try to express some unknown thought, but fails. At the end of it all, I stretch my large body out by her tiny one and spend a long time in completely meaningless, disjointed polite conversation, and only then can I go back to concentrating on my work. If you try to have a conversation with a grown-up you run out of subjects, so you may soon be free to go, but where there’s no subject at all but there is conversation, one can’t think of where to stop—in all the tête-à-têtes that I always have with Meera one can’t find a break in the flow of thought anywhere, so if you must stop, you stop by asserting all your bodily strength.

  137

  Calcutta

  2 August 1894

  My visits to Priya-babu are of great help to me in one thing—I can then tangibly see that literature has a huge contribution to make to the history of man, and that there is a significant connection between it and this insignificant personality’s insignificant life. Then I feel confident in my ability to preserve myself and complete my work—then in my imagination I can see a wonderful picture of my future life. I see that at the centre-point of my everyday life and all that happens—its joys and sorrows—there is an extremely lonely and silent spot where I sit immersed, forgetting everything, in order to undertake my work of creation—where I am happy. All our important thoughts have a generous renunciation about them. When we study astronomy and so go and stand in the sphere of the stars and creation’s mystery, how much lighter all the small burdens of life seem! Similarly, if one can make a great sacrifice or involve one’s self with some large world affair, immediately the burden of one’s own existence seems easily bearable. Unfortunately, even among the educated people of our country, the winds of thought do not blow freely, the connection between life and thought is really very little, and it’s impossible to feel, when you’re in the company of our countrymen, that literature is an important force for humankind—one feels eternally hungry to find one’s own ideals reflected in other people.

  138

  Shilaidaha

  4 August 1894

  There’s been a change of scene. Where is that Calcutta, that second-floor terrace, the daily routine of life in the disorganized clutter of bed, bedstead and chair, that practising of scales on the piano in the next room—that Meera, who although very tiny, occupies such a large space in my world! Suddenly, like a dream, all the towering mansions all around piercing the sky have been transformed into green fields swaying in the wind, the main road of Chitpur flows in the form of an immense, spread-out stream of liquid sound and song, the dust-filled heavy air is clear and transparent, bringing joyful life all over the vast, free sky—in a boat by an open window, at the head of a camp-table upon a cane chair is the chief protagonist, Sri Rabindranath, occupied in writing a letter this morning, and opposite him in another cane chair, his friend Sri —— is concentrating completely on writing a story for Sādhanā. This is how today’s scene has begun. In a moment the nāẏeb will enter with the peśkār’s [bench clerk’s] notebook and tied-up bundles of papers in hand, and then the manner in which the dialogue will begin is such as could never have been composed in this day and age by any human pl
aywright, and even if it were, it would have been roundly criticized by the reviewers’ faction. But the poet of our providence who divides our lives into new and newer acts and scenes every day, propelling us forward to the denouement of the fifth act, is not the least concerned with synchronizing context and character, or with clever composition, or with the arrangement of events; he allows clerks to gather in this dearest of boats upon the stream of the wave-rocked Padma, causes grammatical and rhetorical faults to crop up in the conversation between hero and heroine, and if by any chance or good fortune the hero receives a poetic love letter written correctly according to the rules of aesthetics, then the letter-writer turns out to be a man.