But joy cannot endure until the end.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Fragment ID: 20314
But joy cannot endure until the end.
There is a darkness in terrestrial things
That will not suffer long too glad a note.1
I do not think it is the poetic intelligence any more than Virgil’s Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt2, which I think to be the Higher Mind coming through to the psychic and blending with it. So also his O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.3
Here it may be the intuitive inner mind with the psychic fused together.
1936
1 Pp. 16-17. The question was: “Are these lines the poetic intelligence at its deepest, say, like a mixture of Sophocles and Virgil? They may be the pure or the intuitivised higher mind.”
2 Aeneid, I.462. In 1946 Sri Aurobindo put the source of this line’s inspiration much higher than he does here. See p.810.
3 Aeneid, I.199