Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1937

Letter ID: 1943

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

May 18, 1937

[Rajani’s case.] Oh, it is Kapur! Lt. Colonel N. C. Kapur?

I suppose. Can’t be two C. S. fellows with a name like that.

It is very strange your school had no chemistry.

It may have had in a corner, but I had nothing to do with such stuff.

But for I.C.S. you had no science?

Certainly not. In I.C.S. you can choose your own subjects.

Perhaps these newfangled things hadn’t come out then?

They were newfangled and not yet respectable.

The D.R. cart servant has elephantiasis of the left leg. Now it has increased – the whole foot is swollen. He was complaining of pain... Are we not likely to be responsible for any accident (a remote possibility)?

What accident?

... He ought to be given leave for some days till the pain subsides, for with pain to carry on the work will only set up a vicious cycle.

Evidently he ought to be on leave without pay. If pay is given they don’t care. Cart service seems hardly suitable for that illness. There is however a hammerman in the smithy who goes on with a leg like that.

I am afraid my source of English poetry is exhausted before it has begun. The Guru is supposed to take up the shishya’s troubles!

It seems to me to be rather J’s trouble. She writes fine epic verse and says she is unable to do anything worth while – you write a fine sonnet and decide that your inspiration is exhausted. Queer.

Tell me, please, how I should improve. The details are very difficult to manage.

You have the inspiration, whatever you may say. The management of details still defective can come only by practice.

By a lot of reading and writing or only reading?

Either.

Please bring me back that buoyance, faith and joy, force and confidence. Otherwise finished! Your working is extremely fine and diplomatic, I must say. Gave me an exceedingly fine poem to begin with and cheered me up. Then – “Go on, my dear fellow – spading, efforting, labouring and perspiring! Oh it will come, it will come!”

It is not my working, but your moods that are queer. You get something no reasonable being would expect under the ordinary laws of Nature and then you fancy you haven’t got it and wail because everything is not absolutely, continuously, faultlessly, increasingly, inimitably miraculous through and through and always and for ever. In no sadhana that I know of does absolute sustained perfection in everything come with a rush and stay celestially perfect for ever more. If it were so there would be no need for sadhana – one would only have to gaze at heaven a little and grow wings and fly into the spheres a triumphant godhead.

Your overhead poetry. Sir, not a snatch of it has ever come into Bengali poetry – our Bengali poetry?

I can’t say. I can recognise the thing well enough in English, because I know the symptoms of the O.P. abnormality there. In Bengali it is more difficult for me to detect. I suppose I must try to train my ear for that.