Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 3. Literature, Art, Beauty and Yoga
Section 4. Literature, Art, Music and the Practice of Yoga
Painting, Music, Dance and Yoga

Music and Sadhana [9]

It is absurd to say that you have narrowed or deteriorated because one no longer sings erotic songs. One is not narrowed if one loses taste for jazz and can hear with real pleasure only the great masters or music of a high or exquisite quality. It is not deterioration when one rises from a lower to a higher plane of thinking, feeling or artistic self-expression. Can one say of the man who has grown out of childishness and no longer plays with nursery toys that he has narrowed and deteriorated by the change?

26 August 1933