Shilaidaha
12 December 1895
The other day I was suddenly quite surprised by a very small and minor incident. I’ve written to you before that nowadays in the evenings I light a lamp on the boat and sit and read until I feel sleepy, because one’s own solitary company is not always desirable, especially in the evenings. There’s a proverb that says that people who have no work indulge their aunts by accompanying them on a pilgrimage to the Ganga—a conveniently gratuitous aunt is rarely to be found close at hand when you need one, so then you have only your own mind to occupy yourself—rather than that, I think it’s better to keep yourself occupied with a book. The other evening, I was sitting and reading an English critical work on poetry and beauty and art and other such gobbledegook—while reading the dire argumentation around all this significant stuff there are times when I feel, tiredly, that everything is an empty mirage—that all twelve annas of it are made up, just words on top of words. That day too, as I read, I was filled with a dry, jaded feeling, and a mocking monster of doubt appeared in my mind. As it was getting quite late at night, I slammed the book shut with a bang, flung it on the table with a thud, and blew out the lamp with the intention of going to sleep. The moment the light was extinguished, moonlight flooded into the boat from the open windows on all sides and scattered all around. How astonished and taken aback I was! My tiny little ray of lamplight had been smiling the dry smile of a villain, yet that completely insignificant smile of contempt had entirely obscured the limitlessly deep smile of this universe’s love! What had I been searching for in the heaps of sentences of this dry book—the one I had been looking for had been standing outside all this time, silently filling the entire sky. If by chance I had not seen her, and gone to bed in the dark, then too she would have had no objection to that small wick of my lamp, but would have set silently. If I hadn’t caught a glimpse of her even for a moment in this life and had gone to bed for the last time in the darkness of the last day of my life, then too that lighted lamp would have won, for she would still have spread across the entire world in the same sort of silence and with the same sweet smile—she would not have hidden herself, nor would she have shown herself.
Since then, nowadays in the evenings I’ve begun to put out the lighted lamp.