Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 510

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

November 3, 1934

But the letter on Nirvana? Do see to it tomorrow. I just send you a short song I composed in my closing portion of the tragic novel Dola – to be sung by its heroine in an ecstasy of aesthetic emotional sentimental love – to be disillusioned shortly of course. I have not treated it à la mode or conventionally, but tried to depict the sense of illumination that comes of romance on moonlight nights or vis-à-vis a beautiful piece of scenery, which sort of shines with a kind of reflected lustre of the romance. I have tried to depict it as I have myself felt it often, with a vividness that even I cannot doubt. I wonder if this sort of elation that one feels in front of a lovely vista (particularly the moon-flooded one to which I am particularly susceptible) and associates it with the reflection of the love felt – is at all psychic or purely vital? But its glow is very warm and pervading and delicious and there can be hardly any doubt as to the sense [of?] illumination one is endowed with in such circumstances. May one take it that it is some form of sublimation of the physical love in imagination’s sky – if you know what I mean? I mean I felt very vividly there was an essential delicatesse, subtlety, etherealness in such a transcription of one’s subjective feeling in the objective world of rude matter. Even dull inert things seem to be animate. Illusion? soit – but is it not a beautiful illusion so long as it lasts? Or is such a feeling not an illusion at all but a reflection of some reality that falling on the material scenery transforms the whole landscape? Poet’s feelings are often unreliable – I have a deep distrust of poets hallelujahs – that is why I ask. But I doubt whether I have expressed myself at all clearly. I trust however, that if you read my lyric carefully you will understand what I am driving at.

All these feelings or impressions are aesthetic and of the vital – their imprints over the ordinary movements is that they belong to the inner vital, not to the cruder external life-movements. It is this character that gives them their sense of elevation, beauty, etc. Such movements can be taken up by the psychic when it is the soul in things behind the aesthetic and emotional that is felt and by the spiritual when they are made a means of coming in contact with the cosmic spirit or in any way with the Divine.