Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3

Letter ID: 797

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

July 27, 1936

Your letter this morning is beautiful and written in such a soft humanistic tone almost! I am sure it will help her. The other day you quite floored me by as good as saying that when one wants the Divine all friendship, etc. is little better than nonsense. I agreed though, as I don’t really like terrestrial life and evolution, still the only thing I rather like still in this darkish world is friendship and affection and art and music and poetry. But as all friendship, you pointed out, are stigmatised by some vital warmth or other, well, I told myself (willingly), “Better be cold to all when it is such a trouble and never a help, almost always a hindrance at worst a downfall at best a tolerable thing.” But in this letter you suggest humans do help each other – their destinies meeting and re-meeting to that end. Well, I like this attitude better as, alas, I have had too many friends in my life and still have a soft corner in my heart even for men like Dhurjati, the atheist and Subhash the patriot. However I am babbling to no purpose. This is only to say that some part of my heart was touched by your tone in this letter in contradistinction to that of your other letter where you practically threw freezing water on the fuels of all friendships as their psychic is so little [absurd].

Well, I was speaking in this answer not of Yoga but of the process of human lives in previous stages of development. In Yoga friendship can remain, but attachment has to fall away or any such engrossing affection as would keep one tied to the ordinary life and consciousness – human relations must take quite a small and secondary place and not interfere with the turn to the Divine.

But Jet that pass. I will send this letter to this Princess tomorrow and I am sure she will be helped by it.

I think you have a poem of Nishikanta still with you.

Which one

Still I send you a most remarkable poem of his most powerful and vivid and original nagardola [merry-go-round] you know, don’t you? A number of seats wheeling in a vertical circle and people are joyous in fetes therein? This image has been poetically exploited by Nishikanta in a remarkable manner.

Yes, it is magnificent.

By the way, sorry could not read even with Nolini’s help the last part of your remarks on Browning’s horsemanship. Am enclosing it. Do explain how he was rendered hors de combat at Ghent or whatever it is. Nolini could not throw any light on it.

Well it runs: Browning’s impossible feats of horsemanship in his “How they brought the Good news to Ghent.” Those slips happen to everybody. Unfortunately I have forgotten the lines once very familiar except the last of the stanza,

“Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit”

Roland is the horse and his rider while still on the saddle and galloping at full speed rearranges the saddle, does something with the girths and some other feats which I don’t remember (I believe he kicks off his jack-boots, but I won’t swear to it) – “nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit¹.”

You have just only to get on a horse and try to do these marvellous things to realise their impossibility – I won’t promise that you won’t be in the Bay of Bengal and the horse God knows where before you are quarter of the way through. Anyway your moon and star chandrabindu is just nothing to that.

I am glad you liked the poem of last evening by my father. He was the best song-composer in laghu guru anyhow, and this song was one of his very best, delightful in form and rhythm and image and substance, delicacy of emotion and suggestiveness.

¹ Here are the lines from Robert Browning’s (1812-1889) How

They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.

“I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,

Then shortened each stirrup and set the pique right,

Rebuckled the check-strap, chained slacker the bit,

Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit.”

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