After a fortnight’s weary waiting I have got my Indian mails. Very likely Mrs. Pearson has gone to the country and the letters were waiting at her house. I feel relieved to know that your operation is over and you are none the worse for it.
We are in a delightful country, in a delightful place in France, meeting with people who are so human. I feel clearly that the ultimate reality for man’s life is his life in the world of ideas, where he is emancipated from the gravitational pull of the dust and where he realises that he is spirit. We, in India, live in a narrow cage of petty interests; we do not believe that we have wings, for we have lost our sky; we chatter and hop and peck at one another within the small range of our obstructed opportunities. It is difficult to achieve greatness of mind and character where our responsibility is diminutive and fragmentary, where our whole life occupies and affects an extremely limited area. And yet through the cracks and chinks of our walls we must send out our starved branches to the sunlight and air, and the roots of our life must pierce the upper strata of our soil of desert sands till they reach the spring of water which is exhaustless. The most difficult problem is ours, which is how to gain our freedom of soul in spite of the crampedness of outward circumstance, how to ignore the perpetual insult of our destiny so as to be able to uphold the dignity of man. Our Santiniketan is for this tapasya of India. We who have come there often forget the greatness of our mission, mostly because of the obscurity of insignificance with which the humanity of India seems to be obliterated. We do not have the proper light and perspective in our surroundings to be able to realise that our soul is great, and therefore we behave as if it is doomed to be small for all time.