Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 476

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

August 28, 1934

Yes, that is quite the right attitude, the one I want you to take. I am very glad that you resolved to take it. I shall certainly write about Bejoy Goswami and the miracles and I hope to explain also, always from the point of view of reason, certain other points, e.g. the exact nature and action of psychic and spiritual faith and the reason for faith in the Guru and how it works. Not tonight though – for I have had too much to do tonight.

The lines about which you ask have this meaning. The lover is thinking what happens after death, when love and life are over. He first thinks of the Christian myth of Hell – the first four lines refer to that and to Dante’s description of Paolo and Francesca and other guilty lovers blown round in one of the circles of Inferno – in the smoke and gurge of hell by violent winds – that is the relucent (shining back to the light of the fires) gyres [over?] a circle [sud?] of fires. Next he passes to the Greek ideas of the after-death, according to which the dead go down into the dim, lifeless underworld of Hades, lightless graves, fields no sunlight visits, alleys without any glad murmurs, waters with no flowers. Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Hades from which the shades of the dead have to drink so as to forget their earthly past. Lethe, he says, could [rust] their minds (had its will), but still in the soul memories of love survive and cannot be utterly abolished. Then he returns to the obvious fact of death. “Beauty pays the gift given to her of life into the credit column of Death – she disappears leaving a brief perfume behind her, etc.”

You need not send the book any longer. I have miraculously fished out my copy.