Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Fragment ID: 20329
The body and the life no more were all.
I still consider the line a very good one and it did perfectly express what I wanted to say. I don’t see how I could have said it otherwise without diminishing or exaggerating the significance. As for “baldness”, an occasionally bare and straightforward line without any trailing of luminous robes is not an improper element. E.g.
This was the day when Satyavan must die,1
which I would not remove from its position even if you were to give me the crown and income of the Kavi Samrat for doing it. If I have changed here, it is because the alterations all around it made the line no longer in harmony with its immediate environment.
Not at all [“bareness for bareness’s sake”]. It was bareness for expression’s sake, which is a different matter... It was “juste” for expressing what I had to say then in a certain context. The context being entirely changed in its sense, bearing and atmosphere, it was no longer juste in that place. Its being an interloper in a new house does not show that it was an interloper in an old one. The colours and the spaces being heightened and widened this tint which was appropriate and needed in the old design could not remain in the new one. These things are a question of design; a line has to be seen not only in its own separate value but with a view to its just place in the whole.2
1937
1 P.10
2 The passage originally stood:
A cosmic vision looked at things through light:
Atomic now the shapes that loomed so large.
Illusion lost her aggrandising lens:
The body and the life no more were all,
The mind itself was only an outer court,
His soul the tongue of an unmeasured fire.
The passage then became;
A cosmic vision looked at things through light:
Illusion lost her aggrandising lens,
Atomic were her shapes that loomed so large
And from her failing hand her measures fell:
In the enormous spaces of the Self.
The living form seemed now a wandering shell;
Earth was one room in his million-mansioned house,
The mind a many-frescoed outer court,
His soul the tongue of an unmeasured fire.
At present some of the lines have changed places in the poem and the passage as it stands on page 82 is not quite the same.