Shilaidaha
Sunday, 25 November 1894
Go—— has survived this time. I didn’t sleep almost the entire night the day before yesterday. His boat was right behind mine—I could hear his groans from time to time and was distressed thinking that he might die. It was a silent night, and my room was completely dark. Lying there on my bed I kept thinking how the life and death of man was shrouded in a terrible mystery—at times the still, silent, everlasting time surrounding me on all sides seemed very cruel. In relation to it, our lives, our greatest joys and sorrows, our noblest hopes and desires are so insignificant—it matters little to it whether I die today or tomorrow. Whether I die alone or whether a million people die swept away in the floods is also of no consequence. The sun will die out completely one day with its entire solar world and everything will freeze up, but even that is nothing to it—so many such extinguished, dead worlds, concealing their millions of years of life and play, wander around the skies today. Every layer of the earth contains the fossils of so many lost life forms, not a single descendant of theirs is extant today. So I was lying on my bed and thinking to myself, to whom should I say, on behalf of this dying man, in this endless darkness, ‘Oh, this poor man is suffering so much’? Who shall understand the value of his life if not helpless people like us? For whom is his pain true? If death is an unavoidable, inevitable occurrence for every living thing, why should one suffer such terrible agony? Unless we think of our most personal and heartfelt joys and sorrows and desires as having an eternal recourse somewhere, a dwelling of eternal empathy, everything seems like the cruellest farce! A son’s death takes the form of an absolutely unbearable pain for a mother, but if that has no meaning at all to the eternal, then why this māẏā? My love may mean so much to me, but if it has no place at all in eternity, then it is merely a dream. We are doing our utmost for our country, giving our lives for human progress. But our country is a country only for us, that is, greater than the entire world—man is man only for us, that is, greater than all other living things in the world—if you look at it from the outside then these thoughts and, along with them, all our lifelong efforts are totally farcical. Go—’s impending death seemed terribly grave, terribly important to me; but that was only because I am a man, because I am acquainted with him and near him—was there any real depth or significance in it? Ants die, mosquitoes die all the time, why do we think those deaths to be so insignificant? When a leaf dries and falls, when a lamp is extinguished by the breeze, why aren’t those reasons for grief too? They are no less of a change. To eternity, a solar world dying out, a leaf falling, a man dying, are all the same—so all our grief and our joys and sorrows are only our own. I sometimes think that this world is a battlefield of two opposing forces—one of these is within us and trying to live all the time, and the other is attempting perpetually to kill it—if that were not so then death would have seemed entirely natural to us, it wouldn’t have seemed in the slightest bit terrible—we were one way at one time, and at another time we have become something else—there would be no sorrow or grief or wonder entangled there. But our nature says from within, ‘I want to live’, it says ‘Death is my opponent—I must conquer it’—yet nobody has ever been able to conquer it. But we go on trying. That’s why we feel the pain of death, the grief of death—when the eternal desire of staying alive is repeatedly defeated by death.