Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Literary Activity and Yoga

If you want to understand my supramental “brevities”, you must read carefully. You have absolutely ignored my pregnant “Possibly”. I never said that it must be a waste of time – but “possibly” yes or “possibly” not. Reading Dickens merely cannot give you the spiritual consciousness – that is obvious. It would be a miracle if it did. Reading the Oxford Dictionary might be more helpful in that direction. Unless of course a miracle took place; then even Dickens. But otherwise it may evidently be a waste of time. X got helped by Lawrence's letters – even J gave him a dream-meeting with J and his daughter. But most people would get little that is either occult or spiritual from either. But things done with nirbhar can help – not because of themselves, but because of the nirbhar.

To try to be a literary man and yet not to know what big literary people have contributed would be inexcusable.

Why is it inexcusable? I don't know what the Japanese or the Soviet Russian writers have contributed, but I feel quite happy and moral in my ignorance. As for reading Dickens in order to be a literary man that's a strange idea. He was the most unliterary bloke that ever succeeded in literature and his style is a howling desert.

19.09.1936