I am going to read my lecture on the Poet’s Religion to-night to the Wellesley College students. To-morrow, and the day after, I have to read two more lectures in Emerson Hall, Harvard. Boston is about an hour’s journey from here. I went there last Sunday and I am going to stay there till the end of the week. Coming to Boston has been a great relief to me. I felt in New York like living in the planet Saturn, which has its crowd of innumerable satellites, but revolves some billions of miles away from the central source of light. I am home-sick for my beautiful earth, simple and tender, bathed in light and dressed in green.
Just at this point, I was called away to dinner and then to the meeting; and after it was over, we motored back to Boston, where I am now. It is tiring work—the more so because my heart is hungering day and night for wide space and leisure, that sumptuous feast of the soul, which has been mine from my infancy.
I am suffering from the great discomfort of having my feet on the decks of two different boats—as the Bengali proverb has it. The organiser in me is planning to raise funds. I hate with all my heart this wretched organiser—this disciple of the West. I have my profoundest faith in the sanyasi in me, which is urging me constantly to leave these shores. Yet the organiser in me is claiming the best sacrifice of my life and getting it.
My anxiety is growing stronger every day lest we should lose the least fraction of our independence or naturalness at Santiniketan, lest our responsibility to some dead cash interest, consciously or unconsciously, should lessen our responsibility to the living ideal. All real creations must have freedom for their growth. You can never make truth serve you, fettered like a galley slave. Whenever we receive material help from others, we acknowledge at the same time their expectation. Such expectation is a tyrant, imposing on us a tacit obligation to satisfy it. But all creative work is jealous of its right of spontaneity; so much so, that the artist himself must not be over-conscious of his plan.
Our Shantiniketan has never followed any conscious plan of ours, but has followed its own inner life process. This freedom of vital function is far more valuable than external resources. Truth never condescends to tempt us with allurements. She dwells silent in her majesty of sublime simplicity. It is untruth which tries to decoy us with extravagance of materials. I earnestly wish we had power to create a tapovana, a forest ashram, rather than to build up a University. But unfortunately, money though scarce may be available. But where is tapasya?
Pearson is away. My correspondence and other works have grown heavy: and therefore you will have to bear with me, if my letters become scarce or scrappy.