Glimpses of Bengal Part 13

As I walk on the moonlit sands, S---- usually comes up for a business talk.

He came last evening; and when silence fell upon me after the talk was over, I became aware of the eternal universe standing before me in the evening light. The trivial chatter of one person had been enough to obscure the presence of its all-pervading manifestation.

As soon as the patter of words came to an end, the peace of the stars descended, and filled my heart to overflowing. I found my seat in one corner, with these a.s.sembled millions of shining orbs, in the great mysterious conclave of Being.

I have to start out early in the evening so as to let my mind absorb the tranquillity outside, before S---- comes along with his jarring inquiries as to whether the milk has agreed with me, and if I have finished going through the Annual Statement.

How curiously placed are we between the Eternal and the Ephemeral! Any allusion to the affairs of the stomach sounds so hopelessly discordant when the mind is dwelling on the things of the spirit,--and yet the soul and the stomach have been living together so long. The very spot on which the moonlight falls is my landed property, but the moonlight tells me that my _zamindari_ is an illusion, and my _zamindari_ tells me that this moonlight is all emptiness. And as for poor me, I remain distracted between the two.

SHELIDAH,

_23rd February_ 1895.

I grow quite absent-minded when I try to write for the _Sadhana_ magazine.

I raise my eyes to every pa.s.sing boat and keep staring at the ferry going to and fro. And then on the bank, close to my boat, there are a herd of buffaloes thrusting their ma.s.sive snouts into the herbage, wrapping their tongues round it to get it into their mouths, and then munching away, blowing hard with great big gasps of contentment, and flicking the flies off their backs with their tails.

All of a sudden a naked weakling of a human cub appears on the scene, makes sundry noises, and pokes one of the patient beasts with a cudgel, whereupon, throwing occasional glances at the human sprig out of a corner of its eye, and s.n.a.t.c.hing at tufts of leaves or gra.s.s here and there on the way, the unruffled beast leisurely moves on a few paces, and that imp of a boy seems to feel that his duty as herdsman has been done.

I fail to penetrate this mystery of the boy-cowherd's mind. Whenever a cow or a buffalo has selected a spot to its liking and is comfortably grazing there, I cannot divine what purpose is served by worrying it, as he insists on doing, till it shifts somewhere else. I suppose it is man's masterfulness glorying in triumph over the powerful creature it has tamed.

Anyhow, I love to see these buffaloes amongst the lush gra.s.s.

But this is not what I started to say. I wanted to tell you how the least thing distracts me nowadays from my duty to the _Sadhana_. In my last letter[1] I told you of the b.u.mble-bees which hover round me in some fruitless quest, to the tune of a meaningless humming, with tireless a.s.siduity.

[Footnote 1: Not included in this selection.]

They come every day at about nine or ten in the morning, dart up to my table, shoot down under the desk, go bang on to the coloured gla.s.s window-pane, and then with a circuit or two round my head are off again with a whizz.

I could easily have thought them to be departed spirits who had left this world unsatisfied, and so keep coming back to it again and again in the guise of bees, paying me an inquiring visit in pa.s.sing. But I think nothing of the kind. I am sure they are real bees, otherwise known, in Sanskrit, as honey-suckers, or on still rarer occasions as double-proboscideans.

SHELIDAH,

_16th (Phalgun) February_ 1895.

We have to tread every single moment of the way as we go on living our life, but when taken as a whole it is such a very small thing, two hours uninterrupted thought can hold all of it.

After thirty years of strenuous living Sh.e.l.ley could only supply material for two volumes of biography, of which, moreover, a considerable s.p.a.ce is taken up by Dowden's chatter. The thirty years of my life would not fill even one volume.

What a to-do there is over this tiny bit of life! To think of the quant.i.ty of land and trade and commerce which go to furnish its commissariat alone, the amount of s.p.a.ce occupied by each individual throughout the world, though one little chair is large enough to hold the whole of him! Yet, after all is over and done, there remains only material for two hours'

thought, some pages of writing!

What a negligible fraction of my few pages would this one lazy day of mine occupy! But then, will not this peaceful day, on the desolate sands by the placid river, leave nevertheless a distinct little gold mark even upon the scroll of my eternal past and eternal future?

SHELIDAH,

_28th February_ 1895.

I have got an anonymous letter to-day which begins:

To give up one's self at the feet of another, is the truest of all gifts.

The writer has never seen me, but knows me from my writings, and goes on to say:

However petty or distant, the Sun[1]-worshipper gets a share of the Sun's rays. You are the world's poet, yet to me it seems you are my own poet!

[Footnote 1: Rabi, the author's name, means the Sun.]

and more in the same strain.

Man is so anxious to bestow his love on some object, that he ends by falling in love with his own Ideal. But why should we suppose the idea to be less true than the reality? We can never know for certain the truth of the substance underlying what we get through the senses. Why should the doubt be greater in the case of the ent.i.ty behind the ideas which are the creation of mind?

The mother realises in her child the great Idea, which is in every child, the ineffableness of which, however, is not revealed to any one else. Are we to say that what draws forth the mother's very life and soul is illusory, but what fails to draw the rest of us to the same extent is the real truth?

Every person is worthy of an infinite wealth of love--the beauty of his soul knows no limit.... But I am departing into generalities. What I wanted to express is, that in one sense I have no right to accept this offering of my admirer's heart; that is to say, for me, seen within my everyday covering, such a person could not possibly have had these feelings. But there is another sense in which I am worthy of all this, or of even greater adoration.

ON THE WAY TO PABNA,

_9th July_ 1895.

I am gliding through this winding little Ichamati, this streamlet of the rainy season. With rows of villages along its banks, its fields of jute and sugar-cane, its reed patches, its green bathing slopes, it is like a few lines of a poem, often repeated and as often enjoyed. One cannot commit to memory a big river like the Padma, but this meandering little Ichamati, the flow of whose syllables is regulated by the rhythm of the rains, I am gradually making my very own....

It is dusk, the sky getting dark with clouds. The thunder rumbles fitfully, and the wild casuarina clumps bend in waves to the stormy gusts which pa.s.s through them. The depths of bamboo thickets look black as ink.

The pallid twilight glimmers over the water like the herald of some weird event.

I am bending over my desk in the dimness, writing this letter. I want to whisper low-toned, intimate talk, in keeping with this penumbra of the dusk. But it is just wishes like these which baffle all effort. They either get fulfilled of themselves, or not at all. That is why it is a simple matter to warm up to a grim battle, but not to an easy, inconsequent talk.

SHELIDAH,

_14th August_ 1895.