Letters From a Young Poet 1887 1895

by Rabindranath Tagore

  158

  Calcutta

  29 September 1894

  It’s very surprising, but nowadays when I hear my poems being praised, I don’t feel as happy as I should. Actually, that’s because I don’t entirely grasp that the person who is being praised by people is the same person who writes the poems. I know I haven’t been able to write all the good poems I’ve written just because I wanted to—if a single line in them gets lost, I doubt I’d be able to reconstruct it, however hard I try. The moment I hear praise, I wonder if I’m equal to it—perhaps the best writing I’ve done will never be bettered. Because the power that makes me write is outside of my abilities. I’m sending you a review that appeared in one of the papers. This person has played quite an original hand. He’s abused my poems, but praised my short stories to the sky. There’s another group of people who travel along the exact opposite route. I’m left sitting in the middle, both puzzled and amused. As long as I’m a writer there’s no end to the number of different opinions I will have to hear. And then again, there’s another group of people who say that all the rest of my work will be short-lived, it’s only the songs that will ensure my immortality among men. I think to myself, if fame is the ultimate aim of man’s ambition, I don’t need to worry—I’ve been sitting around throwing stones into the darkness of eternity; out of the whole lot, you never know, one might hit the mark. But it’s one thing to hit the mark by fluke just once, and another thing to hit it for all time. No one can say what will endure eternally and what will not, and I too don’t want to enter into any sort of argumentation about it—for a writer, true immortality is when you yourself experience a joyful feeling of success. Unfortunately, that joy is felt to a greater or lesser degree by almost all writers, from the very best to the very worst.

  159

  Calcutta

  5 October 1894

  All the rain and storm came to an end yesterday. A beautiful sun is out this morning. The morning breeze today has the slightest nip of winter in it, just enough to make you shiver. Tomorrow the Durga Puja starts, so this is a beautiful preamble to it. When ripples of joy flow through all the people of the country* and in every home, then even if you don’t belong to the same society, that joy touches your heart. Day before yesterday on the way to Suresh Samajpati’s house in the morning I saw images of Durga, ten hands aloft, being built in the courtyard of almost every mansion—and all the boys of the houses all around had become very restless. Observing this, I thought how both the young and the old in the country all become like children for a few days and together begin to play with dolls on a very large scale. If you think hard about it, all the higher pleasures are comparable to doll-playing, in the sense that there is no ambition or profit in it—if you look at it from the outside it seems like a sheer waste of time. But something that brings a feeling of joy, a huge enthusiasm, to the people of the entire country can never be wholly barren or insignificant. There are so many people in society who are hard and dry and worldly, for whom poetry and song are all completely meaningless, yet even they are affected by the pervasive feeling of anticipation for the festival and become one with everybody else. Surely this deluge of feeling every year humanizes men to a large extent; for a few days it engenders a feeling of such empathy and softness in the mind that love, affection and pity can easily germinate there—āgamanī, the songs of bijaẏā, the meeting of friends, the melody of the nahabat, the śarat sun and the transparent sky, all of it together composes a joyful poem of beauty within the heart. In the article this time on ‘meẏeli chaṛ’ [womanly rhymes], I have said in part that the joyfulness of boys is the ideal of pure joy. They are able to take an insignificant pretext and imbue it with the fullness of their mind’s feelings—children make an ordinary, ugly, incomplete doll come alive with their own life force and their own joys and sorrows. The person who is able to preserve that power until he’s older is the one we call a thinker. To him, all the things around us are not merely things that are visible or audible, but are full of an inner significance as well—their narrowness and incompleteness made complete by a song. You can’t ever expect that sort of capacity for thought in all the people in a country, but at a time of festivity such as this, most people’s minds are overflowing with a stream of feeling. Then, that which we see from afar hard-heartedly as a mere doll is dressed by the imagination and sheds its doll-like form; then such a vast feeling and life moves through it that every person in the country, whether appreciative or not, is anointed with that holy stream of bliss. Later, when the doll becomes a doll once again, they throw it into the water. All things in the world are like that doll. Those whom we love may only be a person of a particular look or form to others, but to me they may be lit from within by an amazing light; to me they may seem endless and eternal. Those who lack an ear may think of song as merely sound, but to me, that same sound is song. To those who cannot see the beauty of this earth, the earth is a lump of mud encircled by water. But that same lump of mud encircled by water for me is the world. So if you look at it one way, all things are dolls; but if you look at it from the heart, through your imagination, you recognize them as gods—there’s no limit to them. And so, if I were to think of her, who has occasioned every person in Bengal to be moved by joy and devotion, as a mere clay doll, I’d only betray a want of feeling in myself.

  160

  Calcutta

  7 October 1894

  I too know, Bob, that the letters I’ve written to you express the many-hued feelings of my heart in a way that hasn’t been possible in any of my other writings. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t give these to the people to whom I give my published writings. I just don’t have it in me. When I write to you it never crosses my mind that you might not understand something I may say, or may misunderstand it, or disbelieve it, or think of those things which are the deepest truths to me as merely well-composed poeticisms. That’s why I can say exactly what I’m thinking quite easily to you. When I know in my own mind that my readers don’t know me very well, that they won’t quite understand a lot of what I want to say, nor will they try to understand it empathetically, that they won’t accept on trust all the things that don’t match their own experiences, then the heart’s emotions don’t want to flow easily in language, and whatever little is expressed is often substantially disguised. Therefore I feel that our highest expressions cannot be given to anybody at will. That which is deepest, loftiest or innermost within us is beyond our reach; we don’t have the power to gift it or sell it; if we weigh it up and try to sell it then all you get is the outer cover, while the real thing slips away from our grasp. How many people in the world have been able to leave behind that which is their very best? How many have even managed to grasp it? That’s why I don’t believe in autobiographies. We reveal ourselves by chance; we cannot divulge ourselves to others even if we want to or try to—it’s beyond us to express ourselves even to those we spend every hour of the day with. It’s not just because you’ve known me for a very long time that I’m able to express my feelings to you; you have such a genuine nature, such a simple love for the truth, that the truth expresses itself spontaneously to you. That’s by your particular talent. If the best writings of any writer are to be found in his letters alone then we must surmise that the person to whom they are written also has a letter-writing ability. I have written letters to so many others, but nobody else has attracted my entire self to themselves in writing. One of the main reasons for that is that different people are of different sorts, with different ways, and one has to navigate through those differences when one communicates. One’s words are quite easily broken and bent by the time they reach people set in their own ways—and they too see everything in their own way—so that people around them reveal themselves to them only in their own measure. Your genuineness has such a simple transparency in it that it reflects the truth quite unhindered. That German girl who was happy to tell you all her innermost thoughts—that was because of your own natural, calm clarity. You have the abilit
y to easily attract the truth to yourself. By truth I mean the genuine, innermost thought, the thought that we don’t even always know ourselves—not just chatter and gossip and conversation and laughter and fun. The letters that Byron wrote to Moore expressed not merely Byron’s character, but Moore’s character as well—however well written those letters might be, Byron’s innermost nature is not completely revealed in them; they’ve acquired a particular form by bouncing off Moore’s character! Both the person who listens and the person who speaks are together responsible for the composition—

  ‘taṭer buke lāge jaler dheu,

  tabe se kalatān uṭhe.

  bātāse banasabhā śihari kaňpe,

  tabe se marmar phuṭe.’

  (The waves beat upon the shore’s breast,

  Only then does its murmur rise.

  The assembled woods tremble in the wind,

  Only then does that rustle materialize.)

  161

  Calcutta

  9 October 1894

  The śāstras say that we have been constructed in several layers. For instance—there’s the strata of food, of life, of the mind, of science and of joy. When I am in Calcutta, it’s the strata of food and of life that take over the most forcefully, overwhelming all the other finer instincts. Like the majority of Bengal’s people, I too eat and drink and sleep and roam around and chat, made completely inert by being trapped in the material web of everyday routine—the leisure or the inspiration required to think, feel, imagine or express my feelings slowly departs—all of it seems to get rice-smothered. Yet, within me, day and night, a constant niggling feeling of restlessness persists—the weight of inertia becomes unbearable with every passing moment. Plain living and high thinking is actually my ideal. Comfort, dressing up or small habitual practices seem to smother me like a heavy feather quilt on a hot night. When all around you it’s quite simple and empty, one can give the mind some space, otherwise the more the furniture and the servants and the arrangements multiply, the more the mental vista’s perspective is obstructed until comfort becomes more plentiful than joy. I like the thought of what one hears of Japanese home decor—a single spotlessly clean bamboo mat, a single-flower arrangement in a vase upon a wall—no other furniture crowding around. If you want to give your eyes some pleasure, then make your arrangements so that when you open the windows you have boundless sky and beautiful trees all around. It’s very tiresome to surround yourself on all sides with meaningless furniture—because if things are going to become the master then that’s unbearable for the mind. I’m beginning to think of escaping from here. I’m planning to go to Bolpur quite soon. I can quite see that when I go there and sit by myself in the large easy chair on the carriage veranda on a śarat evening, smoothing out my creased inner self and spreading it upon Bolpur’s horizon-extended green fields, my entire life will be anointed by the deepest peace.

  162

  Calcutta

  Thursday, 11 October 1894

  I’ve spent this beautiful śarat morning lying quietly on a couch—the plants and shrubs in my flowerpots were trembling in the lovely breeze that came and touched my body. I really just wanted to lie there and have somebody in the next room play some pieces one after another on the piano as they pleased. And that Chopin of mine would be one of the pieces played. Even if a desire of this sort remains unfulfilled after you wish for it, there’s a sort of happiness in the desire itself. The greatest suffering is when you don’t even feel that desire—that’s when the mind has becomes inert and heavy. There’s a continuous music in nature which works within our minds in the form of an extraordinary anguished desire when we compose music—those desires have a beautiful rāginī of their own, like a very tender, melodious morning song—and that rāginī then makes even those unfulfilled desires peaceful and charming. It is when nature’s music resounds desolately in the far-distant shadows of the mind and finds no returning echo that the mind really becomes joyless, inactive and inert. Then, even if there’s no particular sorrow in your heart, its weight presses down on you like an immovable heavy stone….

  The bīṇā was played quite wonderfully. Somewhat as that Badri had done—the melody seemed to be wrung out of it heart-wrenchingly, and occasionally the jhaṅkār [resonance] of all the strings, from the minor to the major, being struck all at the same time created a fast-paced sequence of waves that played upon the mind from one side to the other and left, and then again after a while, a very slow, tender, faint rustle seemed to smooth out those waves with a pair of soft hands right up to the farthest horizon of the mind and leave. Who will comprehend all the various things the instrument was speaking of—it was as if it nestled up to your breast and unburdened itself of all it wanted to say—at times, when the generous pity of the deep manly tones of the bass strings broke upon you, one felt that the world was completely false and that it was so full of an eternal sorrow and limitless beauty exactly because it was false, and that was why it contained so many rāginīs, such modulations….

  After staying up last night, this morning I lay on the couch, tiredness in my limbs—that’s why to my half-shut eyes, the sun and the trembling of the plants and the breeze upon my tired body felt so sweet. The śarat morning today seemed to shimmer, full to the brim with memories of the idols’ immersion and the festivities; as if all those melodies of the nahabat that had stopped playing had silently spread themselves across the clear sky, and the vacant, sighing tiredness and lassitude engendered by the ending of the festival has today therefore melted into the śarat sun and spread itself out over the entirety of the land, water and sky, wrapping it in a silent melancholy.

  163

  Calcutta

  17 October 1894

  Yesterday I was talking with B—— about the ‘meẏeli chaṛā’ essay. He was saying he couldn’t understand why I wanted to lecture ordinary folk on such an insignificant and pointless subject. I asked him, why did Kalidasa write Śakuntalā and why has that endured till today? There are so many ways of looking at all the big and small things that exist around us and that arrive at every moment, and one can discover so many kinds of joy in them, that they constitute the most important subjects for our analysis. The education that makes the human mind conscious and gives it the strength to experience the world in many ways is the most valuable education of all. Literature has no other palpable result except that it makes the character of man more sentient—that is, it makes man’s nature larger, so that it extends its domain to regions that were outside its purview before. The ability to receive is a far greater strength than any immediate result—that’s why in literature one doesn’t pay as much attention to the subject as to the composition, the imagination, the expression. But I’m not very sure that B—— quite understood all these thoughts.