When I finish reading your letters from Santiniketan I wake up from my lyric dream to find myself at the bottom of a prodigious pile of newspaper prose. My surroundings seem to me like the inside of a whale that has swallowed me.
The idea of freedom, which the people in this country have, is the imaginary freedom of a fly shut up in a glass casket whose walls are invisible. They are surrounded by an impregnable circle of unreality, to which they cling and believe that they are in solid possession of their sky. But I can assure you that you have the right to laugh at these buzzing creatures from your Santiniketan, with their absurd pride at having made their sky thickly substantial. This deludes them with a freedom that is of the eye, while immuring them in a confinement that is of the spirit.
I know how hard this confinement is, because I myself am in its grip. In a sense I am free; I can obtain this moment my passage to India; but the chain with which my ambition fetters me is stronger than anything made with iron.
My freedom is unreal, so long as I cherish slavery in my soul. This is a truism, like our idea of death; but opportunity comes when we discover it in our life, and then it discloses to us its ever newness of truth. I seem to pass through a real training for becoming a sanyasi when I am in this country. Buddha was born to a royal house which gave him the fitness to attain the true majesty of beggardom. I wrote a poem when I was in India, “I shall never be an Ascetic.” But when I am here, inspiration comes to me, with a rush of lyrical fervour, to write a hymn to Shiva, the Lord of Ascetics, who uses the four quarters of the sky for his dress.
This latter fact appeals to me just now more than anything else, when my mind and body are rebelling day and night against the bondage of the tailoring dispensation. It may sound to you like a paradox when I say, that, what oppresses me most in this country is the utter lack of freedom with which the atmosphere is charged. But it is true. I long to draw in the breath of life, but my nostrils get stopped with sand and soot, and then I am choked into acknowledging the truth, that it is not the substance which is most important for us, but the bareness of it.
Leisure and space are the most precious gifts for us; for we are creators. Our real freedom is in the world of our own creation, where our mind can work unhindered and our soul finds its throne from which to survey its own dominion.
When we are in India we dream only of the advantages that money can confer upon us; but when we are in this country we are warned against the danger which there is in money. It has become patent to me, that money can more easily mar than make. It requires a great power of renunciation to keep it living and fluid; to give our works freedom from its constant gravitational pull downwards. The luminously clear vision of Santiniketan owes its transparency to the holy spirit of poverty which reigns there. Money may remove many of the wants it suffers from, but also may remove its shrine of the Shantam, Shivam, Advaitam, transforming it into an office presided over by an efficient accountant. And then, where may the born vagabonds like myself and yourself find their joy?