Shilaidaha
Monday, 19 October 1891
Today is the day of the Kojagar full moon.* … I was walking slowly by the riverside and conversing with myself—one can’t exactly call it a ‘conversation’—perhaps I was ranting on all by myself and that imaginary companion of mine had no option but to listen quietly; the poor thing didn’t have a chance to put in a word in his own defence—even if I’d given him a completely inappropriate speech, he couldn’t have done anything about it. But how marvellous it was! What more can I say! I’ve said it so many times, but it can never be told in its entirety. The river had not a single line upon it—there, on the other shore of the sandbank where the Padma’s waters had reached their last horizon, from there to here, a wide line of moonlight was shimmering—not a single human being, not a single boat—not a tree to be seen on the new sandbank on the other side, not a blade of grass—it seems as if a melancholy moon is rising over a desolate earth—an aimless river flowing through the middle of an unpopulated world, a lengthy old story has come to an end over an abandoned world; today there is nothing left of all those kings and princesses and bridegrooms and their friends and golden cities, only the ‘boundless fields’ [tepāntarer māṭh] and the ‘seven seas and thirteen rivers’ of those stories stretch out in the wan moonlight…. I was walking as if I was the one and only last-remaining pulse of a dying world. And all of you were on another shore, on the banks of life—where there’s the British government and the nineteenth century and tea and cheroots. If I could lift somebody out of there on a small boat and bring him here to this uninhabited moonlight, we would stand on this high bank and look out at the endless water and sand, and the fathomless night would shimmer and hum all around us! So many others have over the years stood here like me, alone, and felt this way, and so many poets have tried to express this, but oh, it is ineffable—what is it, what is it for, what impulse is it, what does one call this lost peace, what does it mean—when will that tune emerge, splitting open the heart precisely through the middle, which will exactly express this musicality!