I wish that I could be released from my mission. For such missions are like a mist that envelopes our soul—they seem to shut us off from the direct touch of God’s world. And yet I have such an immense hunger for this touch. The spring-time has come—the sky is overflowing with sunshine. I long to be one with the birds and trees and with the green earth. The call comes to me from the air to sing, but, wretched creature that I am, I lecture—and by doing it, I ostracise myself from this great world of songs to which I was born. Manu, the Indian law-giver, enjoins us not to cross the sea. But I have done so: I have sailed away from my own native universe—from the birth place of those morning jasmines, from the lotus lake of Saraswati, which greeted me when I was a child even as the finger touch of my own mother. Now, when occasionally I come back to them, I am made to feel that I have lost my caste; and though they call me by my name and speak to me, they keep themselves apart.
I know that my own river Padma, who has so often answered to my music with an amused gleam of tender tolerance in her face, will separate herself from me behind an invisible veil, when I come to her. She will say to me in a sad voice: “Thou hast crossed the sea!”
The losing of Paradise is enacted over and over again by the children of Adam and Eve. We clothe our souls with messages and doctrines and lose the touch of the great life in the naked breast of Nature. This letter of mine, carrying the cry of a banished soul, will sound utterly strange to you in the present-day India.
We hold our mathematical classes in Santiniketan under the madhavi bower. Is it not good for the students and others, that, even in the busiest time of lessons, the branches overhead do not break out into a shower of geometrical propositions? Is it not good for the world, that poets should forget all about the resolutions carried at monster meetings? Is it not right, that God’s own regiment of the useless should never be conscripted for any military contingency of the useful?
When the touch of spring is in the air, I suddenly wake up from my nightmare of giving ‘messages’ and remember that I belong to the eternal band of good-for-nothings; I hasten to join in their vagabond chorus. But I hear the whisper round me: “This man has crossed the sea,” and my voice is choked.
We are leaving for Europe to-morrow and my days of exile are coming to an end. Very likely my letters will be fewer in number from now, but I shall make up for this when I meet you in person under the shadow of the rain-clouds of July.