Letters From A Young Poet: 1887-1895

"A book by another great literary figure, this time from the east: Rabindranath Tagore. It’s not one of his best-known books, but in my opinion, it is one of his very best. It’s a collection of letters to his niece. And when he wrote these, in most cases, there would have been absolutely no thought of publication, which makes their quality all the more remarkable. You might think of this book as an eastern epistolatory nature philosophy. It contains passages of astounding beauty about the natural world that Tagore was inhabiting, which was basically the river deltas around Calcutta. It also contains his reflections on how these give us a very different sense of what’s important and of how to live than one gets in the city. It’s a sort of Eastern counterpart, as I see it, of Romanticism, and again, very visionary. Very nice. I think that’s a great connection. It also reminds me of the philosopher who has been a great influence on my work, Wittgenstein , who over and over again emphasised the importance of description. There are those key lines in Philosophical Investigations , ‘don’t think but look; I repeat, don’t think but look!’; look at how language actually works, look at real examples. And possibly it’s no coincidence that for Wittgenstein Tagore was a towering figure. When Wittgenstein encountered the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, they thought they were going to be meeting a scientifically-minded philosopher, and they were absolutely astonished when Wittgenstein chose to read out long passages from Tagore to them, instead! I think that connection with Walden that you’ve essayed there is a very apt one, Nigel—not very distant in time, from this book of Tagore’s. I think the sensibilities of Thoreau and Tagore are quite similar. And interestingly, neither of them are really writing from or about the deep wilderness, but writing about the places where nature intersects with human life, and also very much writing about water, and places where, water and trees and human beings come together and combine. Absolutely. And this is very much what Tagore does. He’s basically spending leisure time in the Ganges Delta, and in the nearby tributary rivers, especially the Padma, which is the one that he loves. He just writes these letters to his niece and describes what he sees. And then, sometimes, he draws morals or parallels. So let me read you a little one here, which is quite intriguing for us. Here he’s contrasting the existence he has on the Ganges Delta and his boat with the world he lives in the majority of the time. He says this: “The world in which I find myself is full of very strange human beings. They are all occupied night and day with rules and building walls. They carefully put up curtains just in case their eyes actually see anything. Really, the creatures of this world are very strange. It’s a wonder they don’t cover up every flowering bush, or erect canopies to keep out the moonlight.” I think it’s a splendid remark. It intrigues me that he’s interested in something there, which I’m also interested in, which is the way in which we’re not very good—and I include philosophers in this typically—at noticing the world outside of… not necessarily our own minds, but of our own human-made environments. In other words, it’s almost as if Tagore is saying here, ‘Why are people so obsessed with staying in the cave, when there are these wonderful, natural landscapes, that you could see if you just turned your head and look outside.’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I encountered a great example of this some years ago at the University of East Anglia. I was in a meeting with a bunch of colleagues in the Humanities faculty. We were talking about whether we were going to create a new school of the Humanities. And outside the window there developed this astounding, huge thunderstorm, one of the most ferocious thunderstorms I’ve ever seen; and no one took a blind bit of notice of it. I just couldn’t understand it, and I couldn’t relate to that non-seeing. I just thought, ‘Why aren’t we stopping and appreciating, and taking in this this astounding, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.’ But it seemed to me as if my colleagues literally didn’t notice or, if they did, they deliberately turned their heads back inside again. That incident has stayed with me. Well, one of the nice things about this book is that it was never the intention of Tagore himself for this to be a book. I’ve done it both ways. The first time I read it, I read it all the way through and became more and more absorbed. But it’s equally possible to just dip in."