Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
Political Career, 1906 – 1910

Living Dangerously [3]

I was grieved to see that you rubbed off what you wrote. We want to know so much of your life, of which we know so little!

Why the devil should you know anything about it?

Of course I didn’t mean that lack of money is the only danger one can be in. Nevertheless, is it not true that poverty is one of the greatest dangers as well as incentives? Lives of great men show that.

You are writing like Samuel Smiles. Poverty has never had any terrors for me nor is it an incentive. You seem to forget that I left my very safe and “handsome” Baroda position without any need to it, and that I gave up also the Rs. 150 of the National College Principalship, leaving myself with nothing to live on. I could not have done that if money had been an incentive.

I know that the idea has obvious fallacies, but isn’t it broadly true?

Not in the least.

But what is the use of telling me what Nietzsche meant by living dangerously, and how am I to know that you mean the same?

Certainly not the commercial test. I was quoting Nietzsche — so the mention of him is perfectly apposite.

Kindly let us know by your example what you mean by living dangerously.

I won’t. It is altogether unnecessary besides. If you don’t realise that starting and carrying on for ten years and more a revolutionary movement for independence without means and in a country wholly unprepared for it meant living dangerously, no amount of puncturing of your skull with words will give you that simple perception. And as to the Yoga, you yourself were perorating at the top of your voice about its awful, horrible, pathetic and tragic dangers. So —

16 January 1935