Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
Remarks on His Life in Pondicherry after 1926

Correspondence and Literary Work, 1948 – 1949 [3]

You also seem to have misunderstood something I said to X about pressure and difficulties as indicating some unwillingness on my part to write to you; nothing was farther from my mind, I said that only to explain my remissness in writing to you before. I was not referring to the pressure caused by the necessity of hastening the publication of my yet unpublished books or those that need to be republished — there is much work of that kind pressing to be done and much else not pressing but still needing to be done while there is still time, such as The Future Poetry or other works like the first part of Savitri which has to be revised for early publication in book-form. All that could have nothing to do with it — I was referring only to personal difficulties of my own and the difficulties concerning the Ashram which I had to face and which owing to their gravity and even danger had too much preoccupied my mind. That I have mentioned as an explanation of my earlier remissness and not as an excuse,— there could be no valid excuse. Certainly, that had nothing to do with your present trouble and the letter,— the present one,— which I had sent word through X that I was starting to write yesterday.

7 December 1949