Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
CWSA 35
Fragment ID: 8291
Not Grim and Stern [4]
All this insistence on grandeur and majesty makes me remember Shakespeare’s remarks – the greatness that is thrust on one. I am unaware, as of grimness, so of any stiff majesty or pompous grandeur – the state of peace, wideness, universality I feel is perfectly easy, simple, natural, dégagé, more like a robe of ease than any imperial purple. Between X’s palpitating testimony to my grandeur and your melancholy testimony to my majesty – it appears I sit like the Himalayas and am as remote as the stratosphere – I begin to wonder whether it is so and how the devil I manage to do the trick. Unconscious hypnotism? No, for I begin to feel not like the juggler but like the little boy who has to climb his rope and perch there in a perilous and uncomfortable elevation – and it seems to be rather a self-hypnotism by the spectators of the show. All the same it was a relief to find someone writing of a beautiful and “loving” darshan and others who describe it in a similar tone. From which I conclude that the quality of the object lies in the eye of the seer – নানা মুনির নানা মত 1.
1935
1 nānā munir nānā mat many men many minds, sages differ (Beng. )