Nirodbaran
Talks with Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
10 December 1938 – 14 January 1941
27 July 1940
Purani: America has agreed to supply three thousand planes per month.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes. In that case England will very soon match Germany in air-strength.
Nirodbaran: Amery says the Indian situation is not serious.
Sri Aurobindo: Because there is no chance of civil disobedience, perhaps. And Gandhi is now preparing the world for non-violence.
Purani: But nobody accepts it.
Nirodbaran: De Gaulle has advised passive resistance to the French people. C.R. says England may be thinking that if we were independent we wouldn’t help her.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, they have a fear that we may do just as Ireland is doing.
Purani: They say there is a difference of opinion among Hitler’s generals regarding invasion.
Sri Aurobindo: May be only a story. He may be trying to settle the Balkan problem first. But if it is true, it is remarkable that Keitel is against invasion. He has always been for attacking England. He is a general in name only; he knows nothing about war, he is only Hitler’s mouthpiece.
Evening
Purani: Nolini was saying that he found this book of modern poetry very difficult to understand. How many people will read it?
Sri Aurobindo (smiling): Not worth reading. I have read Eliot’s Hippopotamus; it is amusing. Nowadays one reads poetry not to enjoy oneself or for pleasure, but as a duty or a task. All that these Moderns are doing is to take the most commonplace ideas and try to express them in poetry. Whatever is beautiful is to them romantic and whatever is grand is rhetoric. You should take only commonplace, mean things, express them in mean, dirty language, with very little or no rhythm – that is the recipe for modern poetry.
Purani: The same thing is happening in art.
Sri Aurobindo: It is an age of decadence like the Roman decadence, only in a different way. That took a thousand years to start. Now also it may take a thousand years. Hitler’s threatened millennium of the New Order will be like this, probably.