Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7979

Q: On that famous passage of Shakespeare’s –

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. –

would it be legitimate to comment as follows? – «The meaning, on the surface, is that for each of us life will pass away as if it were a dream and what will remain is the sleep of death, an undetailed everlasting rest. But there is a deeper implication: just as the actor-spirits have not been destroyed and only their visible play has vanished while they themselves, seeming to melt into “thin air” have returned to their unknown realm of consciousness, so too the sleep of death is but an annihilation in appearance – it is really an unknown state which is our original mode of existence. Nor is this all: from the fourth line onward the language and the rhythm serve to evoke by a certain large and deep suggestiveness an intuition of some transcendental God-self – a being, rapt and remote, who experiences through each individual life a dream-interlude between a divine peace and peace, an “insubstantial pageant” conjured up for a while by its creative imagination between two states of self-absorbed superconsciousness. We are reminded of the Upanishad’s description of the mystic trance in which the whole world fades like an illusion and the individual soul enters the supreme Spirits unfeatured ecstasy of repose. Shakespeare’s intuition is not pure Upanishad, the supreme Spirit is not clearly felt and whatever profundity is there is vague and unintentional; still, a looming mystic light does appear, stay a little, find a suggestive contour before receding and falling away to a music sublimely defunctive.»

A: I don’t think Shakespeare had any such idea in his mind. What he is dwelling on is the insubstantiality of the world and of human existence. “We are such stuff” does not point to any God-self. “Dream” and “sleep” would properly imply Somebody who dreams and sleeps, but the two words are merely metaphors. Shakespeare is not an intellectual or philosophic thinker nor a mystic one. All that you can say is that there comes out here an impression or intimation of the illusion of Maya, the dream-character of life, but without any vision or intimation of what is behind the dream and the illusion. There is nothing in the passage that even hints vaguely the sense of something abiding – all is insubstantial, “into air, into thin air”, “baseless fabric,” “insubstantial pageant”, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on”. “Stuff” points to some inert material rather than a spirit dreamer or sleep. Of course one can always read things into it for one’s own pleasure, but...

8-3-1935