Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1936

Letter ID: 1583

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

March 25, 1936

I am sorry for the last elision again – I wanted to write – I adopted the device and dropped your attention to save time – I find that I have dropped the word “dropped” altogether and so it became Hebrew, Aramaic or –?

Swahili. African language, sir, somewhere in West Africa.

There you are then, Sir! You admit that Mother did look a little longer than usual – that’s a point gained!

Just Jehovah, man! What of that? Can’t Mother look longer without being furious?

But quarrel over over that...

[Sri Aurobindo underlined the phrase.]

Another ellipse? or a collapse? It sounds like a line of poetry.

Or is it about that girl I wrote to you of long ago and got a smack?

Consider yourself smacked this time also.

Nothing criminal or incriminating – still enough perhaps to make the heart throb. Even my fancy is only a fancy...

Fancy? fudge! It was only a movement of the hormones.

A guilty conscience, a criminal conscience, well, that’s about the size of it. Thrashing, fury I accept all if that was what it was for.

It was not. As there was no thrashing and no fury, it could not be for that.

I am obliged to sleep out for a few days because of repairs in our house. The whole building is smelling of lime, lime and lime.

If you want to be a real Yogi, go on sniffing and sniffing at the lime till the smell creates an ecstasy in the nose and you realise that all smells and stinks are sweet and beautiful with the sweetness and beauty of the Brahman.

I chuckled, Sir, to learn that you held the chart horizontally, because of its length! And E is none of those high sounding “extravagant” words. If you had just looked about you for a moment, lifting your eyes from the correspondence, you would have discovered that E stands for nothing but a simple evening. Clear?

No. What has evening to do with it? Evening star? “Twinkle, twinkle, evening star! How I wonder what your temperatures are?” But I suppose Sir James Jeans knows and doesn’t wonder. But anyhow E for Evening sounds both irrelevant and poetic.