Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  Today the scenery is beautiful, the light is beautiful and the breeze is beautiful. Immersed in this sweetness, I feel like writing something or composing a song while humming to myself, or reading a storybook without too much variety or too much analysis—to lean back comfortably upon the chair and forget about the world, and, as I read, to have the shore’s green line gradually pass by the corner of my eye and for the liquid sound of water to ceaselessly enter my ears. But I don’t see any possibility that all these relatively easily attained desires will be satisfied at the moment. Because even as I write the nāẏeb and the maulabī have come in. The nāẏeb has begun to explain the modalities of the traditional account-keeping of our jamidāri to Sri —— babu; as a result, the sort of revolution in jamidāri language that has been unleashed is such that if I extract even a particle of it in one corner of this letter, you will perhaps not forgive me for the rest of this life—so I shall stop now.

  139

  Shilaidaha

  5 August 1894

  It rained very heavily all of last night—this morning when I woke up at dawn it was still raining continuously and it was grey on every side. Coming out of the bathing room just this moment, I saw layer upon layer, stack upon stack of dense, dark, low cloud amassed in the west above the autumn rice fields, and on the south-east side the clouds had separated a little and the sun was trying to come out, as if a temporary truce had been called between sun and rain. The scene on the other side of the Padma, where the morning light was trying to appear from behind torn clouds, was very beautiful—a freshly bathed, spiritual figure of light seemed to be rising from the mysterious depths of the water to stand in quiet beauty, and on the shore, black clouds that looked like a lion with waving manes were sitting quietly, frowning, paws stretched out over the rice fields, as if conceding victory to the beautiful celestial power, but not yet tamed—sitting in one corner of the horizon with all its anger and pride coiled up. It’s going to rain again right now, one can see signs of that, preparations are on for a proper Śrābaṇ shower—the open door before which the just-awakened smiling rays of light had come and stood is closing again very slowly—the muddy waters of the Padma are getting covered in shadow, from one side of the river to the other, the clouds have joined up with other clouds to occupy the entire sky—its entire set-up is very dark and dense….

  By now the autumn rice and jute fields should have been almost empty, but this time the gods have ensured that the grain is still swaying on the fields. It’s very beautiful to look at—the monsoon sky is tranquil with rain-filled clouds and the entire world is made tender by waving, luscious, green grain—the colour above is deep, and there is a coating of dark colour below as well—the soil is covered everywhere, and the actual colour of the soil can only be seen in the middle of this muddy river water. The river is very muddy. The Padma is carrying along an entire country and many districts; its waters contain so many landowners’ estates dissolved in it. The Padma in its terrible mischievousness takes away one raja’s kingdom hidden in its deep saffron āncal and deposits it overnight at the door of another—and ultimately, a great fight ensues in the morning between the rajas.

  140

  Shilaidaha

  8 August 1894

  Today the entire day —— babu has been away; today the entire day I have heard the sounds of the river. No unnecessary replies have had to be made to incoherent questions. If just one person is present in front of you, you immediately cannot hear half of what nature is saying. I’ve noticed that nothing is more draining than piecemeal conversation. If you need to keep your strength of thought and strength of imagination alive preceding an act of creation, it is necessary to maintain absolute silence for quite some time. Your own talk completely distracts you. None of you have perhaps ever experienced spending day after day without speaking at all. If you had, you would have understood that in that situation one’s ability to be receptive towards what is all around you and the power to enjoy it increases exponentially—for then suddenly one realizes that there are conversations happening on every side, and that we can hear that variety of speech only when we stop our own endless blabbering; today every liquid consonant of the gurgling river seems to be showering the softest affection on every part of my body—my mind today is very solitary and completely silent, and within me, a secret silence reigns stilly, so as to be fit to sit respectfully and affectionately face-to-face with this cloudless, light-filled, crop-swayed, gurgling-watered, generous countryside—I know that when in the evening I pull up the easy chair to the roof of the boat to sit there alone, that evening star of mine in my sky will appear before me like a member of my family! This evening of mine on the Padma is a very old acquaintance—when I used to come here in the winter and it would get very late returning from the kāchāri and my boat would be tied to the sandbank on the other side, I would cross the silent river on a small fisherman’s dinghy, and this same evening would wait for me with a serious yet pleased expression; the entire sky would be ready, spread out with a particular peace, benevolence and repose; the still silence of the Padma in the evening would seem to me exactly like my own inner quarters at home. I have a certain human domestic relationship with nature here, a certain intimate familial feeling—which no one knows but me. How true that is cannot be felt by anybody even if I try to tell them. The deepest part of life which is always silent and always secret—that part slowly come out of itself and goes around in the naked evening and naked afternoons here in silence and without fear. Those ancient footsteps seem to leave their mark on the days over here.

  We have two lives—one is in the world of men, and the other in the world of thought. Many pages of the life story of that world of thought have I written upon the sky above the Padma. I can see that writing whenever I come here, and whenever I can be alone. When I come here I understand I have not been able to accomplish anything in my poems. I have not been able to express what I have felt. That’s because language doesn’t belong to me alone—it belongs to everybody, but what I experience with my entire temperament isn’t experienced by everybody, so their language therefore cannot express my experience with any clarity.

  141

  Shilaidaha

  9 August 1894

  The river is absolutely full to the brim. One can barely see the shore on the other side. The water is bubbling up and boiling in some places, and again in some others somebody seems to be pressing down on the restless water with both hands and ironing out the creases to hang it up to dry. Nowadays I often see the dead bodies of small birds come floating down the current—the history of their deaths is quite clear. They had their nests in the branches of the mango trees in some mango orchard at the edge of a village. They had returned to their nests in the evening and were sleeping, their soft, warm wings gathered together, their bodies tired; suddenly at night the Padma turned over on her side and immediately the soil at the base of the tree crumbled, and the tree fell into the water with all its anxious spread-out roots; the birds, expelled from their nests, woke suddenly in the night for just a moment—and then there was no need to wake any more. The sight of the floating dead bodies of these birds suddenly strikes the heart quite hard. One realizes that the life that we love more than anything has very little value for nature. I’ve noticed that when I’m in the districts, animals and birds and other living things come very close to me—one doesn’t think of one’s self as very much different or of a higher status than them. The difference between me and other living things feels trifling in the face of a vast, all-enveloping, mysterious natural world. The deaths of these birds that float by in such neglect don’t seem any less important than my own death. In the cities, human society is so complex and human endeavour so bright that man becomes extremely important there—so, cruelly, he does not consider any other life even worth equating with his own. In Europe too, man is so complex and so important that animals are considered to be only animals. Indians don’t think twice about the fact that one is a man in this birth and
an animal in the next, and then from animal to man again—they feel very strongly that even insects by virtue of being living things are on an equal level with you—that is why in our śāstras pity for all living things has not been discarded as an impossible excess of feeling. When I come to this generous mofussil, and an intimate relationship develops between our bodies, the Indian part of my personality awakens—I can enter into the happiness and sorrow of all living things. If one has to eat the meat of birds simply in order to quell one’s hunger, then I’m reminded of our own young ones. Then I cannot unconsciously disregard how keenly the small beating breast of a bird, covered in the softest of feathers, feels the happiness of life. That’s why every time I come to the mofussil I feel a real repugnance towards meat-eating, and later when I enter Calcutta society again I turn non-vegetarian once more. There all living things except man become inanimate objects. In the villages, I am an Indian, and when I go to Calcutta, I am a European. Who knows which one is my actual character?

  142

  Shilaidaha

  10 August 1894

  Last night, not very late, I was woken by the sound of water. A great tumult and powerful restlessness had suddenly come to the river. Perhaps all of a sudden a new current of water had entered it. This sort of thing happens almost every day. You’ve been sitting for some time when suddenly you see that with a gurgling, splashing sound, the river has awoken and there is a great celebration all around. If you put your foot on the planks of the boat you can clearly feel what a variety of forces run untiringly underneath it—at different times it either trembles or wavers or swells up or falls with a thud. Exactly as if you’re feeling the pulse of the land. Last night at midnight a sudden surge of restless joy came and quickened the dance of this pulse rate quite a bit. I sat for a long time on the bench by the window. There was a very misty light, which made the entire wild river seem even madder. Occasional clouds in the sky. The shadow of a great big flickering star lengthened upon the water for quite a distance, shivering like a shuddering, piercing sorrow. Both banks of the river lay unconscious, shrouded in indistinct light and deep sleep. In the middle, a sleepless mad restlessness flowed on in full force and disappeared. If you wake up and sit like this in the middle of the night, in the midst of such a scene, you feel as if you and the world are somehow in some way made anew, as if the world of daylight and commerce with men had become utterly untrue. Again, waking up this morning, how faraway and indistinct that world of my night seems to have become. For man, both are true, yet both are terribly independent of one another. It seems to me as if the world of the day is European music—in tune and out of tune, in part and in the whole—coming together like a huge, forceful tangle of harmony, and the world of the night is our Indian music, a pure, tender, serious, unmixed rāginī. Both move us, yet both are opposed to each other. There’s a hesitation and a tremendous opposition right at the root of nature, where everything is divided between king and queen—there’s nothing we can do about it: day and night, variety and wholeness, the expressive and the eternal. We Indians live in that kingdom of night. We are entranced by that which is timeless and whole. Ours is the song of personal solitude, Europe’s is that of social accompaniment. Our music takes the listener outside of the limits of man’s everyday vicissitudes to that lonely land of renunciation that is at the root of the entire universe, while Europe’s music dances in different ways to the endless rise and fall of man’s joys and sorrows.

  143

  Shilaidaha

  12 August 1894

  Are you enjoying Goethe’s biography? You will have noticed one thing—that although Goethe was in some respects a very aloof personality, he still had a connection with men, he was absorbed in man. The royal court he inhabited had a living affection for literature; Germany was stirred at the time by certain forceful currents of thought—important thinkers and intellectuals like Herder, Schlegel, Humboldt, Schiller and Kant had arisen in different corners of the country, and both the company of the men of those times and the revolution in thought countrywide were very alive. We wretched Bengali writers feel that lack of man’s inner life very keenly—we cannot always keep our imagination alive by supplying it with the provision of truth; our minds do not impact upon other minds and so our compositions remain joyless to a large extent. The people of our country have read so much English literature, but the pressure of thought has not spread corporeally in their bones—there is no hunger for thought in them, no mental substance has taken shape yet within their material bodies, that’s why the need for a life of the mind is absolutely minimal in them—yet there’s no way one can make that out from their conversation, because they’ve learnt all the mannerisms of the English language. They feel very little, think very little and do very little work—that is why their company brings no pleasure. If even Goethe needed a friend like Schiller, how do I explain how absolutely indispensable the life-giving company of one real, genuine thinker is to people like us! It is necessary to feel a loving touch, a sort of constant warmth from the presence of human company upon the place where our entire life’s achievements stand—otherwise its flowers and fruits do not accumulate enough colour, smell or taste.

  144

  Shilaidaha

  13 August 1894

  Although some of my published writing is insignificant, such as what I write only in order to fill up the spaces of Sādhanā, still, even there I try my utmost to take as much care as possible. I try to express my inner truth in my writing with an appropriate respect and genuineness—I can never neglect my Saraswati under any circumstance. Recently … I read an English article written by … a famous artist. I disagreed with him on a number of subjects, but I saw that we were alike in two respects. First, that one has to make one’s ideal of beauty and one’s talent succeed despite the incompleteness of the material world, and second, a fierce desire to express one’s self. That doesn’t mean wanting to talk about yourself because of conceit; but all that I really think, really feel or really have has to be expressed as truly as possible—that’s the only true end—this feeling is absolutely integral to my character—a restless inner force works constantly in that direction. Yet I don’t feel that that force is mine alone, it seems that it is an energy spread over the world that works through me. Almost everything I write seems to me to be beyond my own powers—in fact, even my minor prose pieces. Something outside of my own abilities comes naturally and does its own work even in all the logical argumentation that I’ve prepared beforehand and turns the whole thing into something unthought-of by me. My greatest joy in life is in dedicating myself, enchanted, to that force. Not only does it allow me to express myself, it also makes me feel, makes me love. That’s why my own feelings are new and surprising to me each time. The sorts of feelings that arise in my mind when I am in the midst of nature seem to be beyond my own powers, my own character. That’s why I feel that I will never be able to explain it to anybody or make them believe it. All my feelings have that ingredient of something that is more than me. In my fondness for Meera I feel the presence of such a limitless mystery that she does not remain just my daughter Meera any more—she becomes a part of the fundamental mystery and beauty of this world, and my affectionate enthusiasm becomes like a meditative prayer. I believe that all our affection, all our love is like a mysterious prayer—only, unconsciously so. Love means the awakened appearance of the inner force of the universe within us—it is a momentary experience of the joy that is at the root of the constant joy of the universe. Otherwise it has no meaning at all. The omniscient power of attraction that ties the entire rotating world together by a single thread is the same force that makes the apple fall from the tree to the ground. That force in the material world is similar to the force of world-enveloping joy in the mind—and we feel love within our hearts and beauty in the world because of that force—the endless activity of joy within the world is what works within my mind as well. If we see the two separately then it has no real meaning any more. There is only one prope
r answer to the question of why we feel such joy in nature and in man (however minute or restless that joy may be): ānandāddhyeba khalvimāni bhūtāni jāẏante, ānanden jātāni jībanti, ānandaṃ praẏantyabisaṃbiśanti.* If you don’t understand what this means yourself there’s no way you can explain it to anyone else.