I have just come back from Greenwich, a suburban part of New York, where last night I had a reception and a speech and a dinner and a discussion, till I felt empty like a burst balloon, with no gas left in it!
At the far distant end of the wilderness of such trials as this, what do I see?—But what matters it? Results of our efforts delude us by appearing as final. They raise expectation of fulfilment and thus draw us on. But they are not final. They are roadside inns where we change our horses for a farther journey. An ideal is different. It carries its own progress within itself. Each stage is not a mere approach to the goal, but carries with it its own meaning and purpose.
Trees proceed on their upward career, not along a railway track constructed by engineers. We who have been dreamers, should never employ coolies to build railway lines of social service. We must solely deal with living ideas, and have faith in life. Otherwise we are punished, not necessarily with bankruptcy, but with success—behind which sits the Mephistopheles of worldliness, chuckling at the sight of an idealist dragged through the dust by the chariot of the prosperous.
What has made us love Santiniketan so deeply is the ideal of perfection, which we have tasted all through its growth. It has not been made by money, but by our love, our life. With it, we need not strain for any result; it is fulfilment itself—the life which forms round it, the service which we daily render to it. Now I realise, more than ever before, how precious and how beautiful is the simplicity of our Ashram, which can reveal itself all the more luminously because of its dark background of material want. I know that I am harping on this one subject in most of my letters lately—because my suffering is continuous and profound. My soul is being choked in this atmosphere. But it is my tapasya. Let me not bring a fetter of gold back for my Ashram, but freedom of spirit, with its wedded companion, Poverty—the pure, the simple, the tender, the austere.