The funny thing is that S complains so much and says hunger also is less, but he looks none the worse.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1936
Letter ID: 1792
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
December 5, 1936
Nishikanta says that taking my poetry as a whole, some command over expression and harmony is there, but the বক্তব্য1 is not clearly expressed, either because I don’t know what I want to say or because the power of expression hasn’t yet developed.
I don’t know about that. The বক্তব্য is there, it seems to me, and expressed, but it does not come to so much as one would expect from the richness of the expression. I suppose he means that you have caught only a little of something that might be expressed – only a hair of the tail instead of the complete animal.
Perhaps it is true about the বক্তব্য, but the difficulty is that very often I don’t know what will follow. I get a line to begin with and let myself go.
That is not the case.
Very fine things can come in that way.
Can you give me your opinion? Is there no way to hasten the process?
No, it will come all right as you grow. You are only an infant, just now.
I wrote to you about my happiness, but the very next morning a nebulous cloak of depression fell on me and I am still under it! Well!
Tut, tut, tut! You really must get rid of this kind of thing, hang it all. Out of this kind of nebula no constellation can be made.
The funny thing is that S complains so much and says hunger also is less, but he looks none the worse.
Are you sure he is not a “malade imaginaire”? – at least to a large
1 vaktavya: theme.