Letters from a Young Poet (25 page)

Shilaidaha
16 May 1893

In the evenings, after six-thirty, I have a bath, and then, neat and clean and cool, I walk by the riverside on the sandbank for about an hour, after which I drag our new
jolly boat
into the river, and,
spreading out my bedding on it, lie down in the cool breeze in the dark of the evening in complete silence.

Shai—— sits by me and chatters away. The sky above my eyes is inlaid with stars—I think to myself almost every day—will I ever be born again under this starry sky? If I am, then will I ever again be able to make my bed on the
jolly boat
and lie down upon it on the silent Gorai River in this beautiful corner of Bengal in such a peaceful, entranced state of mind on such a tranquil evening? I shall perhaps never find another evening like this one in another birth. One doesn't know how the scenery will change, or even what sort of mind one will be born with! Perhaps I may be given many such evenings, but those evenings may not rest upon my breast with loosened hair and with such deep love. And will I remain exactly the same man I am now! Amazingly, my deepest fear is that I may be reborn in Europe. Because there's no way one can expose one's entire heart, bring it up so close to the surface and lie around in this way over there, besides which, it's considered a great sin to just lie around like this. One has to work very hard in a factory or a
bank
or in
Parliament
, with all one's body and soul—the mind and its habits are paved and made appropriate for running a
business
in the same way that the city's roads are laid with bricks and made hard for business and commerce and carriages and horses to use—there are no cracks there for a soft blade of grass or an unnecessary tendril to grow. It is a very well-trimmed, beaten-and-moulded, tied-down-with-laws and sturdy sort of system. God knows, but I don't think my imagination-loving, useless, self-absorbed, spread-out-like-the-sky manner of mind is in any way a thing of shame. Lying here on the
jolly boat
I don't think I am the slightest bit smaller than those men of business in the world. Rather, if I too had tightened my belt and got down to work, I might have felt terribly diminished in comparison with those strong men capable of cutting down big
oak
trees. But, on the other hand, does that mean that this entranced youth lying flat upon a
jolly boat
is really a bigger man than Rammohun Roy?

Calcutta
21 June 1893

The
diary
this time is not exactly a eulogy to nature—it's a discussion on the subject of the turmoil created by the wild, restless thing called the mind when it enters our body. Actually the deal was that we should eat, be clothed, live—there was absolutely no crying need to try to investigate the original reason for the existence of the world; to wilfully create a very difficult metre and then try and express a very difficult thought within it and then again want the rhyme to scan at every step; to be drowning in a sea of debts and yet spend money from our own coffers every month to publish
S
ā
dhan
ā—and, on the other hand, look at Narayan Singh, how he makes thick
ruti
with wheat and
ghī
and adds some curd and happily indulges in a pleasurable meal, and, having first had a smoke in advance, falls easily into an undisturbed sleep in the afternoon; he does a few odd jobs for Loken in the morning and evening, and rests comfortably all night; he never even dreams that his life is in vain, or that it has not mattered—he doesn't think it is his responsibility to see that the world is progressing as rapidly as it should. The word ‘success' does not mean anything in life—nature has ordained only one thing, and that is ‘keep living'. Narayan Singh obeys that commandment and is at peace—and the wretched man who has allowed a living thing called the mind to dig a hole and build a nest in his heart has no rest, no end to his duties, no peace; for him, nothing is enough—he has lost all sense of proportion vis-à-vis the situation surrounding him; when he is on water, he wants to be on land, when he is on land, he is full of an ‘endless desire' to swim in the water. What I want to say is—it would be a great relief to be able to take this dissatisfied, restless mind and drown it in the fathomless peace of nature so that one could sit and be still for a moment.

Calcutta
22 June 1893

You took a dig at me the other day in your letter, saying we look at things like marriage, etc., in an excessively
theoretical
way—and I've thought about what you said a great deal, after which I have no doubt in my mind that what you've said is true. Really, people like me do tend to look at most things from a distance—the tendency is to want to look at every single thing analytically. The mind is like a
bull's eye lantern
. The light cast by its thoughts falls upon one thing at a time so that you cannot see the next thing—in fact, it tends to make the first object twice as dark and light up the adjacent thing with an excessive brightness. This way of looking has many faults. If you look at things in the context of everything that surrounds it, then the eye and the mind tolerate almost anything—if you see one part of this vast world as a constituent of the entire world, it will not seem so important to you any more. All my
philosophising
with regard to Sw——'s marriage is quite useless. Joy and sorrow exist in every situation, neither is present in absolute excess—on the whole a man and a woman who have pledged their lives to each other are meant to live in harmony and happiness—if you keep in mind the fact that the world is not greater than what it is and compare all its aspects, you'll find that it all adds up. Just see how the Sw——s are quite happy—of course the force of this happiness will become lesser with time, and life, tied to the bonds of routine and affection, will flow slowly along on its course. Wretched, ‘thinking' people like me don't seem to understand this fully. Even with regard to ourselves, we have made ourselves unsuccessful and unproductive by constantly thinking and imagining things—every single section of a situation assumes far too much importance with us. So happiness becomes excessive happiness and sorrow turns intensely powerful, but the
chief happiness and peace of life, a proportionate harmony and unity in our totality, are missing—that's why, walking for such a long time with these fragmentary, scattered joys and sorrows, life becomes absolutely exhausting—one feels that one doesn't want happiness or unhappiness or anything any more, but to just lie down forever, calmly and peacefully, in this generous, open, beautiful, tranquil countryside and bask in the sunlight—what a relief that would be. But those who are not in the least bit disturbed by the thing called the mind have no particular worries about anything at all in the world—they will be happy, they will make others happy, and it will be very easy for them to fulfil all of life's obligations. It's tremendously unfair of me to express these unhealthy thoughts of my worn heart and make you unduly anxious about the world. For you, the world will hold plentiful happiness, and life will unfold in many new scenes with many changes—and you will be able to enjoy all of it with a happy mind and full heart.

Shilaidaha
Sunday, 2 July 1893

If you want to properly enjoy something, you must build a fence of leisure on every side of it—and you will enjoy it to the full sixteen annas only when you can spread it out to dry, let it loose, stretch it out in all directions. One of the principal reasons that one likes to receive letters in the mofussils is because here one has the time to drink in every drop of every word to the dregs; the imagination can twine around, wind around, and get entangled in every word—one can feel a certain motion in one's imagination for quite a while. If you become greedy and hurry, you are deprived of that joy. The desire for happiness hurries along at such a speed that there are times when it leapfrogs over happiness itself, and then
it's all over in the blink of an eye. No letter is quite enough in the midst of all this work to do with land records and landholdings and litigation and clerks—it's as if one has not found food sufficient for one's hunger. But the older I become, I see that what you get is often dependent on your own ability to receive. It's wrong to file a complaint or a lawsuit about how much you are entitled to receive from others; the real thing is, how much can you take? To be able to possess entirely what comes to hand is accomplished only with a lot of education, practice and self-discipline. Almost three quarters of one's life is spent in acquiring that education, and there's not much time left after that to enjoy the fruits of that education. Thus goes the first chapter of the
śāstra
on how to live happily.

Shilaidaha
Monday, 3 July 1893

Yesterday the wind howled all night like a street dog—and the rain, too, was unending. The water on the field was flowing through it from every direction like small waterfalls and entering the river with a gurgling sound. The farmers were getting wet as they crossed over on the ferry to cut the rice on the sandbank on the other shore, some with
tog
ās [hats] and some holding a broad
kacu
leaf over their heads—the boatman sitting at the helm of these large, fully loaded boats, getting drenched, and the oarsmen towing the boat along from the shore, getting soaked as they walked. Such a calamity, yet the world's business cannot come to a stop; the birds sit dejectedly in their nests, but the sons of men have left their homes and come out. Two cowherd boys have brought a herd of cows to graze in front of my
boat
; the cows wander around, chewing on the luscious, green, rain-freshened wet grass with a munching sound, their mouths full and their tails swishing to drive away the
flies from their backs, their eyes calm and peaceful as they eat—the rain and the cowherd boys' sticks come down ceaselessly upon their backs, both equally irrationally, unfairly and unnecessarily, and they're putting up with both without comment, with the utmost patience, continuing to chew noisily on the grass. The look in the eyes of these cows is strangely melancholy, calm, deep and affectionate—why do these large animals have to be burdened with the load of man's work in the middle of all this? The river's water rises every day. One can see from the window of the
boat
today almost as much as could be seen day before yesterday from the top of the
boat
—every morning I wake up and see that the landscape is gradually getting extended. All these days I could see the heads of the trees of that distant village like so many clouds of green leaves; today, the entire forest presents itself in front of me from end to end—land and water approach each other slowly like two shy lovers—their timidity has almost overflowed, they are almost in an embrace now. It will be wonderful to travel on this full river during the full monsoons on this boat—I'm impatient to untie the
boat
's mooring and take off.

Shilaidaha
Tuesday, 4 July 1893

This morning there is a hint of sun. The rain is on hold from last evening onward, but there are so many clouds stacked in so many layers by the sides of the sky that there's not much hope—it's exactly as if the dark
carpet
of clouds has been rolled up and kept piled in one corner of the sky. A busybody wind will come right now and scatter the clouds all over the sky again, and then there will be no sign of the blue sky and golden sunlight. The amount of water the sky had in it this time! The river water has entered our sandbank.
The farmers are bringing back their unripe grain, cut and piled high on the boats—their boats pass by mine, and I can constantly hear the sounds of lament. You can quite understand how terribly cruel it is that they have had to cut down unripe grain when the grain would have ripened in another four days' time. They can only hope that some ears of rice might hold a couple of grains that have hardened a little. Nature's way of functioning must have mercy in it somewhere I'm sure, or else where did we get it from, but it's difficult to know where to find it. The complaints of these hundreds and thousands of wretched innocents is not reaching anywhere—the rain continues to fall as it must, the river rises as it must, one cannot obtain an audience with anybody concerning all this in the whole universe. One has to make one's self understand that nothing is understandable. But if man has been endowed with so much intelligence, he should have also been given the brains to realize that there is pity and justice in the world, because it is imperative that he understands that much at least. But all this is just unnecessary nitpicking—because creation can never be a happy experience. As long as there is incompleteness, there will be want and there will be sorrow. If the world had not been the world but had been God, then there would have been no imperfections anywhere—but one doesn't have the courage to ask for that much. If you think about it, everything goes back to the fundamental problem—why was the world created? But if you don't have any complaints on that score, then to raise the complaint that there is unhappiness in the world is quite bogus. That's why the Buddhists deal with it by treating the fundamental issue—they say that as long as there is existence, there is sorrow, so they want nirvana. The Christians say that sorrow is a noble thing; that God himself was born as man in order to share in our suffering. One must obtain whatever consolation one can from that. But philosophical sorrow is one thing, and the sorrow of ripening grain getting submerged is quite another. I say that whatever happens is good; this fact that I have happened, that this amazing universe has happened, is a
huge gift—such a thing should not be spoiled. Buddhadeb says in reply, if you want to keep this thing, then you must put up with sorrow. A wretched man like me replies, if it is necessary to suffer in order to protect whatever is good or dear to you, then I will suffer—let me live, and let my world exist. Occasionally, I will have to put up with a lack of food or clothing, with unhappiness, with despair; but if I love existence more than suffering, and if I put up with that suffering in order to exist, then it does not behove me to say anything further.