NEW LITERATURES IN ENGLISH – I MA ENGLISH Unit:1 POETRY Wilfred Campbell : The Winter Lakes (Canada) David Rubadiri : A Negro Labourer in Liverpool (Africa) Sri Aurobindo : The Pilgrim of the Night (India) Shaw Neilson : The Bard and the Lizard (Australia) Derek Walcott : Ruins of a Great House (The West Indies) Allen Curnow : Time (New Zealand). Unit:2 -PROSE Tagore : Sadhana Chapter I – III V.S Naipaul : Area of Darkness Unit:3 -DRAMA Soyinka : The Road Unit:4 -FICTION Chinua Achebe : Things Fall Apart Tony Morrison : The Bluest Eye Unit:5-CRITICISM 1.Margaret Atwood : Ice Women v. Earth Mothers : the Stone Angel and The Absent Venus 2.Stuart Hall : Cultural Identity and Diaspora Unit:6 Contemporary Issues 2 hours Expert lectures, online seminars – webinars
Winter Lakes Wilfred Campbell, in full William Wilfred Campbell, (born June 1, 1861, Berlin, Ontario, Canada—died January 1, 1918, near Ottawa, Ontario), Canadian poet, best remembered for Lake Lyrics and Other Poems (1889), a volume of poetry that celebrates the scenery of the Lake Huron–Georgian Bay country near his home. He is considered a member of the Confederation group. Campbell was educated at the University of Toronto, ordained (1885), and, after his retirement from the ministry (1891), was employed until his death by the civil service in Ottawa. His works are informed by a missionary zeal for the culture of what he called the “British race,” and he took pride in his Scots and English antecedents. His other books of verse are The Dread Voyage (1893), Beyond the Hills of Dream (1889), The Collected Poems of Wilfred Campbell (1905), and Sagas of Vaster Britain (1914). Campbell’s output includes verse plays, descriptive studies of Canadian life, and two historical novels. He edited an edition of The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1913). The Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell (1923) was edited and includes a memoir by W.J. Sykes.
Poem Out in a world of death far to the northward lying, Under the sun and the moon, under the dusk and the day; Under the glimmer of stars and the purple of sunsets dying, Wan and waste and white, stretch the great lakes away. Never a bud of spring, never a laugh of summer, Never a dream of love, never a song of bird; But only the silence and white, the shores that grow chiller and dumber, Wherever the ice winds sob, and the griefs of winter are heard.
Crags that are black and wet out of the grey lake looming, Under the sunset's flush and the pallid, faint glimmer of dawn; Shadowy, ghost-like shores, where midnight surfs are booming Thunders of wintry woe over the spaces wan.
Lands that loom like spectres, whited regions of winter, Wastes of desolate woods, deserts of water and shore; A world of winter and death, within these regions who enter, Lost to summer and life, go to return no more.
Moons that glimmer above, waters that lie white under, Miles and miles of lake far out under the night; Foaming crests of waves, surfs that shoreward thunder, Shadowy shapes that flee, haunting the spaces white.
Lonely hidden bays, moon-lit, ice-rimmed, winding, Fringed by forests and crags, haunted by shadowy shores; Hushed from the outward strife, where the mighty surf is grinding Death and hate on the rocks, as sandward and landward it roars.
Summary
This is a highly philosophical poem written by William wilfred Campbell a Canadian poet. In the first stanza the poet is describing a world of death in the form of a winter lake. The lake is lying far to the northward under the sun, the moon, the dusk and the day under the glimmer of stars, purple sunsets dying, wan, waste and white all stretch away the Great Lakes. In the second stanza is describing a dull and useless life without love, happiness and peace. That place is lacking bud of spring, laugh of Summer, dream of love song of bird but only silence and white. The shores of lakes are chill and dumb. In the sob of the ice winds the winter griefs are heard. In the third stanza sorrowfulness of life is described. rock are black and life is described. The lake itself is Grey in colour. The rough rock are black and wet and looming. Looking very pale under the sunsets flush and pallid. They are very shadowy and ghost like but the Midnight surfs are booming thunders of winter sadness in feeble way. In the fourth stanza the lakes look like ghosts and covered with winter snow. The woods nearby are desolated. No habitation near the shore. so it is a world of winter and death. If anybody enters from there happy summer life there return no more. In the fifth stanza the poet is describing the waters that lie white under and stretch miles and miles of lake. Foaming crest of waves, surfs shadowy shapes all this look like ghost over the spaces.In the last stanza the poet is clearly describing the death and hate on the rock, hidden bays, moon lit. ice rimmed, winding, fringed by forest and crags, shadowy shores all haunt place. The external struggle of man compared to death and hate roaring a sand and land. The poem is highly pessimistic all the words used in negative form only death and hate played a major role in the poem.
A NEGRO LABOURER IN LIVERPOOL -DAVID RUBADIRI
James David Rubadiri is a Malawian diplomat, academic and poet. At independence in 1964, Rubadiri was appointed Malawi's first ambassador to the United States and the United Nations. On Tuesday August 18th, 1964, he presented his credentials to President Johnson at the White House and expressed the hope that his newly independent country would get more aid from the United States. Ambassador Rubadiri said that Malawi needed help to build its democratic institutions and noted that Malawi was already receiving US economic and technical help. David Rubadiri left the government in 1965 when he broke with President Hastings Banda.
Education
Rubadiri attended King's College, Budo in Uganda from 1941-1950 then Makerere University from 1952-1956, where he graduated from with a bachelor's degree in English literature and History. He went on to the University of Bristol from 1956-1960, where he received a master of arts degree in English literature.
Publications
His only novel, No Bride Price was published. The novel criticized the Banda regime and was, along with Legson Kayira's The Looming Shadow, some of the first published work by Malawians.
Poem
I passed him slouching in dark backhouse pavement head bowed taut haggard and worn a dark shadow amidst dark shadows
I stared our eyes met but on his dark negro face no sunny smile no hope or a longing for hope promised only the quick cowed dart of eyes piercing through impassive crowds searching longingly for a face that might flicker understanding this is him the negro labourer in Liverpool that from his motherland with new hope sought for an identity grappled to clutch the fire of manhood in the land of the free.
Summary David Rubadiri's "A Negro Labourer at Liverpool" exemplifies the pathetic situation of the average Negro. The poet asserts how his individuality is suppressed in a white-dominated society. He has turned out to be another "dark shadow amidst dark shadows". The words are very meaningful here. Firstly, it points to the poet's state of identity crisis. How he is marginalized, and his individuality is relegated to the background Further, his community is looked down upon, verging on the burning issue of Apartheid. Again, it is a 'shadow' without any authenticity or reality of being of its own. The whites have redefined his 'white' not to adorn a 'sunny smile'. Present in a span of tortures, his future is bleak: a dark night of hopelessness. The indefinite article 'a' in the title further adds light to the state of identity crisis of the negro laborer at Liverpool. He is just one among others. An indefinite article and two common nouns (negro,laborer) sum up his identity in a nutshell.
He does not possess any ray of hope regarding help from the outsiders. The only thing he seeks for is a warm smile, or a nod of understanding translating into the acknowledgement of his suffering. The negros's back has been bent by oppression, colonialism and collective submission to a force that has been deemed indestructible. There is no silver lining to his predicament. He works resigned to his fate with lack of feeling and spiritual numbness. Sri Aurobindo Sri Aurobindo (born Aurobindo Ghose; 15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yogi, guru, poet, and nationalist.[2] He joined the Indian movement for independence from British rule, for a while was one of its influential leaders and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution. Aurobindo studied for the Indian Civil Service at King's College, Cambridge, England. After returning to India he took up various civil service works under the Maharaja of the Princely state of Baroda and became increasingly involved in nationalist politics in the Indian National Congress and the nascent revolutionary movement in Bengal with the Anushilan Samiti. He was arrested in the aftermath of a number of bomb outrages linked to his organization in a public trial where he faced charges of treason for Alipore Conspiracy. However Aurobindo could only be convicted and imprisoned for writing articles against British rule in India. He was released when no evidence could be provided, following the murder of a prosecution witness, Narendranath Goswami, during the trial. During his stay in the jail, he had mystical and spiritual experiences, after which he moved to Pondicherry, leaving politics for spiritual work. At Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo developed a spiritual practice he called Integral Yoga. The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into a divine life. He believed in a spiritual realisation that not only liberated but transformed human nature, enabling a divine life on earth. In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (referred to as "The Mother"), he founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. His main literary works are The Life Divine, which deals with theoretical aspects of Integral Yoga; Synthesis of Yoga, which deals with practical guidance about Integral Yoga; and Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, an epic poem
The Pilgrim of the Night I made an assignation with the Night; In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous: In my breast carrying God's deathless light I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo. I left the glory of the illumined Mind And the calm rapture of the divinised soul And travelled through a vastness dim and blind To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll. And still that weary journeying knows no end; Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time, There comes no voice of the celestial Friend, And yet I know my footprints' track shall be A pathway towards Immortality. SUMMARY No one the less, Mother also announced: Salvation is physical. A divine life in a divine body must necessarily involve a physical transformation. But that comes, as Sri Aurobindo and Mother well knew, only as the culmination of the inner spiritual journey, not at the beginning, nor even at midpoint. Even in our external world, one cannot hope to obtain a Ph.D. without first having gone through the primary, secondary, pre-university, and university stages. And we tend to forget that Mother began her yoga of the body, her descent into the cellular level, only after practicing yoga for nearly 60 years, during which time she had systematically gone up and down the ladder of the worlds. It was after ascending to the supramental level that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother began their descent through the physical subconscient down to the cellular and mineral levels. They were pilgrims of the Light first, before they became pilgrims of the Night, as Sri Aurobindo made clear in his sonnet, "The Pilgrim of the Night":
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother hewed for us, through trackless virgin jungle, a pathway to super humanity. But one can be attacked by a grizzly bear even on a jogging track, as happened recently to a woman in Montana. Seekers need to be very clear in their minds that Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga is not an invitation to a picnic, and certainly not to an American-style extravaganza. There are serious pitfalls and dangers on the spiritual path, for the good reason that it is infinity we hope to explore and experience. And infinity contains heights as well as abysses, gods and angels as well as the devils of the deep. The light some seekers imagine they see at the end of the tunnel may be, as Robert Lowell once joked grimly, only the light of the oncoming train. I am no guru (appalling thought), just one seeker among many. But like other fellow-seekers, I have come to appreciate the need for constant vigilance in the light of the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, so that one may not lose one's way and be stuck for an unconscionable time in what Sri Aurobindo called "the valley of the false glimmer." Talking about how the vital mimics the spiritual, Mother once observed: "The vital is a sort of super- theater giving performances--very alluring, dazzling, deceptive performances--and it's only when you know the True Thing that, immediately, instinctively, without reasoning, you discern and say, "'No, I don't want that.'" There are several things in this country that merit admiration and emulation. Nonetheless, one must also observe that nowhere else is this vital super-theater more rampant than in America- -a mindless craze for vital extravaganzas of all kinds. Your cinemas, theaters, newspapers, radios and television cable channels make billions of dollars providing them, not merely to cater to domestic vital appetites. You also export them to lands overseas, and have thus contributed to a worldwide deterioration of taste in art, poetry, literature, music, cinema, and theater. In January this year, on a visit to Pondicherry, I was taken aback to see a beautiful Indian lady on TV singing in Tamil the glories, not of Krishna or Shiva, but of Lux toilet soap. Next it might be Kentucky Fried Chicken, if that hasn't already begun. In modern Indian films they already leap, cavort, and vigorously shake their hips and bottoms a la Michael Jackson.
More things are in the offing, like what is called the information superhighway. Press some computer buttons and you can tune into the Internet's cyberspace, where you can encounter everything from vicious political and racist propaganda, religious fundamentalism and its screaming bigotries, terrorism and its targets, crackpot cults, pornography, and all the rest of the unholy tribes in the endless catalog of modern economic barbarism. We originally emerged from primitive forests, only to find ourselves today in an electronic jungle. Cyberspace, in fact, is the topmost floor of the modern counterpart of the biblical Tower of Babel. You know what happened to that tower. It bears endless repetition that for those on the spiritual path, the true push-buttons of the human journey are within, not without. It is precisely all this vital super-theater that estranges us from the many-splendored thing we seek.
The Bard and the Lizard- Shaw Neilson The lizard leans in to October, He walks on the yellow and green, The world is awake and unsober, It knows where the lovers have been: The wind, like a violoncello, Comes up and commands him to sing: He says to me, “Courage, good fellow! We live by the folly of Spring!” A fish that the sea cannot swallow, A bird that can never yet rise, A dreamer no dreamer can follow, The snake is at home in his eyes. He tells me the paramount treason, His words have the resolute ring: “Away with the homage to Reason! We live by the folly of Spring!” The leaves are about him; the berry Is close in the red and the green, His eyes are too old to be merry, He knows where the lovers have been. And yet he could never be bitter, He tells me no sorrowful thing: “The Autumn is less than a twitter! We live by the folly of Spring!” As green as the light on a salad He leans in the shade of a tree, He has the good breath of a ballad, The strength that is down in the sea. How silent he creeps in the yellow — How silent! and yet can he sing: He gives me, “Good morning, good fellow! We live by the folly of Spring!” I scent the alarm of the faded Who love not the light and the play, I hear the assault of the jaded, I hear the intolerant bray. My friend has the face of a wizard, He tells me no desolate thing: I learn from the heart of the lizard, We live by the folly of Spring!
John Shaw Neilson was born in Penola, Australia, in 1872, to an impoverished bush family. He was the first child of seven, and his family called him Jock. Because he had a speech impediment, his family kept him out of school, but he received some education at home. His father, a farmer, and his uncle wrote poetry and encouraged him to read and write. Neilson read the work of English Romantic authors, as well as some of the Victorians and was familiar with songs from England, Ireland, Scotland, and America, as well as the ballads of the Australian bush.
Summary
He uses intentional fallacy method.. He compares poet and the Lizard. He is a lyric poet. He uses simile, Oxymoran..In the spring season lizard dominates the place similarly the poet also. In the October season mainly spring makes us to live. Wind makes us to sing, live, gives courage. Sea cannot swallow by fish, a bird cannot rise so high, dreamer cannot follow dream, similarly the poet also. The leaves are green and to red and Lizard eyes are too old and he knows where the lovers are there but he wont be bitter but he tells to poet that autumn is less than spring. Lizard being green and leans on the shade of tree, being silent creeps , has good breath, down in the sea. But being so silent and he says that lives only by spring. Lizard being so tough to survive in the world like wise poet also struggle to live. Lizard life also ends with sorrow similarly poet life also ends with sadness. and he ends the poem only spring season makes alive.
Derek Walcott - A Summary of Ruins of a Great House
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1] He was the University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught undergraduate and graduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement."[2] In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature,[3] the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets[4] and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015. Summary Ruins of a Great House focuses on history, colonialism, literature and corruption through power. It's a poem that reveals Walcott's ambivalence towards the culture of Great Britain, at its most dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries when slavery was a hugely profitable business. The British colonised much of the Caribbean during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, setting up vast plantations worked by black slaves who were subjected to abominable cruelties. He is quite naturally repelled by the actions of the British towards native African peoples yet has to reconcile the fact that he writes in and is heavily influenced by the English language. So it is that throughout the poem various quotes and paraphrases from English writers are inserted, the effect of which is to both heighten awareness and sharpen contrast. The poem also explores the inevitable tensions arising between master and slave, perpetrator and victim, history and legacy, writer and conscience. Walcott uses: Metaphor. The metaphorical use of a ruined plantation house as the former empire underpins the narrative. Metonym. The lime fruit is a metonym for the British Empire. Lime plantations were particularly profitable and useful because lime fruits helped combat the scourge of scurvy aboard British naval ships. Allusion. The English language and culture as expressed by notable writers such as Donne, Blake and Kipling and explorers Hawkins, Raleigh and Drake, is used to create a sense of irony and antipathy. Derek Walcott was born in 1930 on St Lucia in the British West Indies and has been exploring the roots of his culture in his poetry by using the English language. As a black poet (and dramatist) he has had to wrestle with the issue of versifying in English, the language of those who enslaved many of his people. Ruins of a Great House presents the reader with vivid imagery and stark contrast. Here is an initially objective speaker detailing the ruinous state of a house, going back through time, becoming personal (with a first person I) in an attempt to fathom out just what it is he feels and thinks. There is anger and reasoning and finally compassion, an acknowledgement that yes, those slaves who lived and worked here were subject to appalling injustices, yet those who were cruel came from a country that had also once been a colony, of the Romans. It's one of Walcott's earlier poems, written in 1956 and published in his breakthrough book In A Green Night 1962. Ruins of a Great House - Epigraph The epigraph (the short quotation before the start of the poem proper) is from Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) an English writer and polymath, who wrote the book Hydriotaphia, Urn- Burial, in 1658, detailing the discovery of ancient Roman burials and coals from funeral pyres in his native land. Walcott chose this quote because it highlights the nature of death and the idea of colonisation - the Romans took over Albion (Britain), the British took over the Caribbean.Ruins of a Great House though our longest sun sets at right declensions and makes but winter arches, it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes. . . Poem Browne, Urn Burial Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House, Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust, Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws. The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain; Axle and coach wheel silted under the muck Of cattle droppings. Three crows flap for the trees And settle, creaking the eucalyptus boughs. A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose The leprosy of empire. ‘Farewell, green fields, Farewell, ye happy groves!’ Marble like Greece, like Faulkner’s South in stone, Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone, But where the lawn breaks in a rash of trees A spade below dead leaves will ring the bone Of some dead animal or human thing Fallen from evil days, from evil times.
It seems that the original crops were limes Grown in that silt that clogs the river’s skirt; The imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone, The river flows, obliterating hurt. I climbed a wall with the grille ironwork Of exiled craftsmen protecting that great house From guilt, perhaps, but not from the worm’s rent Nor from the padded cavalry of the mouse. And when a wind shook in the limes I heard What Kipling heard, the death of a great empire, the abuse Of ignorance by Bible and by sword.
A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone, Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake, Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed In memory now by every ulcerous crime. The world’s green age then was rotting lime Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text. The rot remains with us, the men are gone. But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind That fans the blackening ember of the mind, My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne.
Ablaze with rage I thought, Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake, But still the coal of my compassion fought That Albion too was once A colony like ours, ‘part of the continent, piece of the main’, Nook-shotten, rook o’erblown, deranged By foaming channels and the vain expense Of bitter faction. All in compassion ends So differently from what the heart arranged: ‘as well as if a manor of thy friend’s. . . ‘
Allen Curnow : Time (New Zealand).
Thomas Allen Monro Curnow (17 June 1911 – 23 September 2001) was a New Zealand poet and journalist.Curnow was born in Timaru, New Zealand, the son of a fourth generation New Zealander, an Anglican clergyman, and he grew up in a religious family. The family was of Cornish origin.[1] During his early childhood they often moved, living in Canterbury, Belfast, Malvern, Lyttelton and New Brighton. He was educated at Christchurch Boys' High School, Canterbury University, and Auckland University.
After completing his education, Curnow worked from 1929 to 1930 at the Christchurch Sun, before moving once again to Auckland to prepare for the Anglican ministry at St John's Theological College (1931–1933). In this period Curnow also published his first poems in University periodicals, such as Kiwi and Phoenix.
In 1934 Curnow returned to the South Island, where he started a correspondence with Iris Wilkinson and Alan Mulgan, as well as finding a job at The Press, the Christchurch morning daily newspaper, having decided against a career in the Anglican ministry. At the same time, he also started a lifelong friendship with Denis Glover and contributed to the Caxton Press, submitting some of his poems. He then taught English at Auckland University from 1950 to 1976.
I am the nor-west air among the pines
I am the water-race and the rust on railway lines
I am the mileage recorded on the yellow signs.
I am dust, I am distance, I am lupins back of the beach
I am the sums the sole-charge teachers teach
I am cows called to milking and the magpie’s screech.
I am nine o’clock in the morning when the office is clean
I am the slap of the belting and the smell of the machine
I am the place in the park where lovers were seen.
I am recurrent music the children hear
I am level noises in the remembering ear
I am the saw mill and the passionate second gear.
I, Time, am all these, yet these exist
Among my mountainous fabrics like mist,
So do they the measurable world resist.
I, Time, call down, condense, confer
On the willing memory the shapes these were:
I, more than your conscious carrier,
Am island, am sea, am father, farm, and friend,
Though I am here all things my coming attend;
I am, you have heard it, the Beginning and the End.
Summary
The “Time” poem basically refers to defining the meaning of time. In the first four stanzas the poet starts introducing each line by utilizing the phrase ‘I am’, and then goes on in giving examples of where time is seen, how time is seen and used, and what time is. The repetition of the words ‘I am’ represents a metaphor for time, and time it is also being personified with human-like qualities. From stanzas five to seven, the poet mainly focuses on basically saying that time is everything, and he does this by using strong words; such as “ I, time, am all these, yet these exist.” This is a very good way of letting people know/understand what the poem is about, that line is direct to the reader and does not leave us wondering of the meaning of the line. The poet is completely clear with the readers, he makes his points clear and we can see how confident he is with his writing. TIME Allen Curnow Allen Curnow is New Zealand's most important poet. He believed in living literature. He once said, "You can't write literature, you can't paint art". First published in 1977, ‘Time’ reflects nature and life in New Zealand. Some of his poetry tried to explore ‘the private and unanswerable. ’ This is one such poem.. Here "Time" speaks for itself. Thus the poem is time's autobiography. The first four stanzas contain random images of time, and time is everywhere. In the first stanza, time is in the northwest monsoon blowing through the pine forests. It is dynamic like the racing water, and static like the unused rails on which trains do not run. It is also static like the mileage written on boards that have yellowed with time. Thus time keeps others moving towards their destinations, although static itself in the form of a mileage board. In the second stanza, Time is the dust which fills the atmosphere. It is like lupins that grow along the beach to stop erosion. It is the sums taught by a sole teacher of a rural school, where there is only one class and one teacher, and perhaps one time. It is like the cows about to yield milk and the song of the magpie. The third stanza marks the beginning of work in a clean office and its hustle and bustle. The smell emanating from the machines at work, indicate time in full swing. Time is compared to a place in the park where lovers meet. In the fourth stanza, time is the timeless music enjoyed by children over the years, or perhaps a familiar refrain that bring back memories of a bygone time. It is the echo of familiar noises in the ear. Even the sawmill represents time’s activity, and the time conscious driver applies the second gear in a bid to hurry. In the fifth stanza, Curnow compares the first four stanzas to mist. The phrase ‘my mountainous’ is a metaphor and ‘like a mist’ is a simile. All the images in the first four stanzas are like a huge fabric of mist that wraps a mountain, which cannot be contained but melt away like the mist. It cannot be measured or contained. In the 6th stanza, Time lives in our memory, packing into its tiny spaces events of bygone years. It is sharper than our very being. In the final stanza, Curnow presents all aspects of New Zealand life, island, sea, father, farm and friend. All these things work to time. The final line, ‘I am, you have heard it, the Beginning and the End’ seems to encompass an almost Godlike status of Time. It is a bibilical reference to the ‘Alpha and the Omega’ in the Book of Revelations. Although the poem is in the first person, the poet goes back into the past when he speaks of ‘recurrent music’ and ‘willing memory’. I also think he is referring to the future when he says ‘...... and the end’ in the final line of the poem. Time is presented as omnipresent. The stanzas which are presented in rhyming triplets, are unusual and rich in alliterations. Time is a force, it is all pervasive and continuous..... In conclusion, we are left to imagine that time can represent whatever each individual desires it to represent. Perhaps Curnow is trying to explore ‘the private and unanswerable’.
Unit:2 PROSE Tagore : Sadhana Chapter I – III Rabindranath Tagore FRAS (/rəˈbɪndrənɑːt tæˈɡɔːr/ (About this soundlisten); born Robindronath Thakur, 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941; sobriquet Gurudev, Kobiguru, Biswakobi)[a] was a Bengali poet, writer, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter.[2] He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali,[3] he became in 1913 the first non-European as well as the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.[4] Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.[5] He is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal". A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan district[7] and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old.[8] At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics.[9] By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist,[10] he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy also endures in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's "Jana Gana Mana" and Bangladesh's "Amar Shonar Bangla". The Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work The Relation of the Individual to the universe The civilization of ancient Greece was nurtured within city walls. In fact, all the modern civilizations have their cradles of brick and mortar. These walls leave their mark deep in the minds of men. They set up a principle of 'divide and rule' in our mental outlook, which begets in us a habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another. We divide nation and nation, knowledge and knowledge, man and nature. It breeds in us a strong suspicion of whatever is beyond the barriers we have built, and everything has to fight hard for its entrance into our recognition. When the first Aryan invaders appeared in India it was a vast land of forests, and the new-comers rapidly took advantage of them. These forests afforded them shelter from the fierce heat of the sun and the ravages of tropical storms, pastures for cattle, fuel for sacrificial fire, and materials for building cottages. And the different Aryan clans with their patriarchal heads settled in the different forest tracts which had some special advantage of natural protection, and food and water in plenty. Thus in India it was in the forests that our civilization had its birth, and it took a distinct character from this origin and environment. It was surrounded by the vast life of nature, was fed and clothed by her, and had the closest and most constant intercourse with her varying aspects. Such a life, it may be thought, tends to have the effect of dulling human intelligence and dwarfing the incentives to progress by lowering the standards of existence. But in ancient India we find that the circumstances of forest life did not overcome man's mind, and did not enfeeble the current of his energies, but only gave to it a particular direction. Having been in constant contact with the living growth of nature, his mind was free from the desire to extend his dominion by erecting boundary walls around his acquisitions. His aim was not to acquire but to realize, to enlarge his consciousness by growing with and growing into his surroundings. He felt that truth is all-comprehensive, that there is no such thing as absolute isolation in existence, and the only way of attaining truth is through the interpenetration of our being into all objects. To realize this great harmony between man's spirit and the spirit of the world was the endeavour of the forest-dwelling sages of ancient India. In later days there came a time when these primeval forests gave way to cultivated fields, and wealthy cities sprang up on all sides. Mighty kingdoms were established, which had communications with all the great powers of the world. But even in the heyday of its material prosperity the heart of India ever looked back with adoration upon the early ideal of strenuous self-realization, and the dignity of the simple life of the forest hermitage, and drew its best inspiration from the wisdom stored there. The west seems to take a pride in thinking that it is subduing nature; as if we are living in a hostile world where we have to wrest everything we want from an unwilling and alien arrangement of things. This sentiment is the product of the city-wall habit and training of mind. For in the city life man naturally directs the concentrated light of his mental vision upon his own life and works, and this creates an artificial dissociation between himself and the Universal Nature within whose bosom he lies. But in India the point of view was different; it included the world with the man as one great truth. India put all her emphasis on the harmony that exists between the individual and the universal. She felt we could have no communication whatever with our surroundings if they were absolutely foreign to us. Man's complaint against nature is that he has to acquire most of his necessaries by his own efforts. Yes, but his efforts are not in vain; he is reaping success every day, and that shows there is a rational connection between him and nature, for we never can make anything our own except that which is truly related to us. We can look upon a road from two different points of view. One regards it as dividing us from the object of our desire; in that case we count every step of our journey over it as something attained by force in the face of obstruction. The other sees it as the road which leads us to our destination; and as such it is part of our goal. It is already the beginning of our attainment, and by journeying over it we can only gain that which in itself it offers to us. This last point of view is that of India with regard to nature. For her, the great fact is that we are in harmony with nature; that man can think because his thoughts are in harmony with things; that he can use the forces of nature for his own purpose only because his power is in harmony with the power which is universal, and that in the long run his purpose never can knock against the purpose which works through nature. In the west the prevalent feeling is that nature belongs exclusively to inanimate things and to beasts, that there is a sudden unaccountable break where human-nature begins. According to it, everything that is low in the scale of beings is merely nature, and whatever has the stamp of perfection on it, intellectual or moral, is human-nature. It is like dividing the bud and the blossom into two separate categories, and putting their grace to the credit of two different and antithetical principles. But the Indian mind never has any hesitation in acknowledging its kinship with nature, its unbroken relation with all. The fundamental unity of creation was not simply & philosophical speculation for India; it was her life-object to realize this great harmony in feeling and in action. With meditation and service, with a regulation of her life, she cultivated her consciousness in such a way that everything had a spiritual meaning to her. The earth, water and light, fruits and flowers, to her were not merely physical phenomena to be turned to use and then left aside. They were necessary to her in the attainment of her ideal of perfection, as every note is necessary to the completeness of the symphony. India intuitively felt that the essential fact of this world has a vital meaning for us; we have to be fully alive to it and establish a conscious relation with it, not merely impelled by scientific curiosity or greed of material advantage, but realising it in the spirit of sympathy, with a large feeling of joy and peace. The man of science knows, in one aspect, that the world is not merely what it appears to be to our senses; he knows that earth and water are really the play of forces that manifest themselves to us as earth and water - how, we can but partially apprehend. Likewise the man who has his spiritual eyes open knows that the ultimate truth about earth and water lies in our apprehension of the eternal will which works in time and takes shape in the forces we realize under those aspects. This is not mere knowledge, as science is, but it is a perception of the soul by the soul. This does not lead us to power, as knowledge does, but it gives us joy, which is the product of the union of kindred things. The man whose acquaintance with the world does not lead him deeper than science leads him, will never understand what it is that the man with the spiritual vision finds in these natural phenomena. The water does not merely cleanse his limbs, but it purifies his heart; for it touches his soul. The earth does not merely hold his body, but it gladdens his mind; for its contact is more than a physical contact - it is a living presence. When a man does not realize his kinship with the world, he lives in a prison- house whose walls are alien to him. When he meets the eternal spirit in all objects, then is he emancipated for then he discovers the fullest significance of the world into which he is born; then he finds himself in perfect truth, and his harmony with the all is established. In India men are enjoined to be fully awake to the fact that they are in the closest relation to things around them, body and soul, and that they are to hail the morning sun, the flowing water, the fruitful earth, as the manifestation of the same living truth which holds them in its embrace. Thus the text of our everyday meditation is the Gayatri, a verse which is considered to be the epitome of all the Vedas. By its help we try to realize the essential unity of the world with the conscious soul of man; we learn to perceive the unity held together by the one Eternal Spirit, whose power creates the earth, the sky, and the stars, and at the same time irradiates our minds with the light of a consciousness that moves and exists in unbroken continuity with the outer world. It is not true that India has tried to ignore differences of value in different things, for she knows that would make life impossible. The sense of the superiority of man in the scale of creation has not been absent from her mind. But she has had her own idea as to that in which his superiority really consists. It is not in the power of possession but in the power of union. Therefore India chose her places of pilgrimage wherever there was in nature some special grandeur or beauty, so that her mind could come out of its world of narrow necessities and realize its place in the infinite. This was the reason why in India a whole people who once were meat-eaters gave up taking animal food to cultivate the sentiment of universal sympathy for life, an event unique in the history of mankind. India knew that when by physical and mental barriers we violently detach ourselves from the inexhaustible life of nature; when we become merely man, not man-in-the-universe, we create bewildering problems, and having shut off the source of their solution, we try all kinds of artificial methods each of which brings its own crop of interminable difficulties. When man leaves his resting- place in universal nature, when he walks on the single rope of humanity, it means either a dance or a fall for him, he has ceaselessly to strain every nerve and muscle to keep his balance at each step, and then, in the intervals of his weariness, he fulminates against Providence and feels a secret pride and satisfaction in thinking that he has been unfairly dealt with by the whole scheme of things. But this cannot go on for ever. Man must realize the wholeness of his existence, his place in the infinite; he must know that hard as he may strive he can never create his honey within the cells of his hive, for the perennial supply of his life food is outside their walls. He must know that when man shuts himself out from the vitalising and purifying touch of the infinite, and falls back upon himself for his sustenance and his healing, then he goads himself into madness, tears himself into shreds, and eats his own substance. Deprived of the background of the whole, his poverty loses its one great quality, which is simplicity, and becomes squalid and shamefaced. His wealth is no longer magnanimous; it grows merely extravagant. His appetites do not minister to his life, keeping to the limits of their purpose; they become an end in themselves and set fire to his life and play the fiddle in the lurid light of the conflagration. Then it is that in our self-expression we try to startle and not to attract; in art we strive for originality and lose sight of truth which is old and yet ever new; in literature we miss the complete view of man which is simple and yet great. Man appears instead as a psychological problem, or as the embodiment of a passion that is intense because abnormal, being exhibited in the glare of a fiercely emphatic artificial light. When man's consciousness is restricted only to the immediate vicinity of his human self, the deeper roots of his nature do not find their permanent soil, his spirit is ever on the brink of starvation, and in the place of healthful strength he substitutes rounds of stimulation. Then it is that man misses his inner perspective and measures his greatness by its bulk and not by its vital link with the infinite, judges his activity by its movement and not by the repose of perfection - the repose which is in the starry heavens, in the ever-flowing rhythmic dance of creation. The first invasion of India has its exact parallel in the invasion of America by the European settlers. They also were confronted with primeval forests and a fierce struggle with aboriginal races. But this struggle between man and man, and man and nature lasted till the very end; they never came to any terms. In India the forests which were the habitation of barbarians became the sanctuary of sages, but in America these great living cathedrals of nature had no deeper significance to man. They brought wealth and power to him, and perhaps at times they ministered to his enjoyment of beauty, and inspired a solitary poet. They never acquired a sacred association in the hearts of men as the site of some great spiritual reconcilement where man's soul had its meeting-place with the soul of the world. I do not for a moment wish to suggest that things should have been otherwise, It would be an utter waste of opportunities if history were to repeat itself exactly in the same manner in every place. It is best for the commerce of the spirit that people differently situated should bring their different products into the market of humanity, each of which is complementary and necessary to the others. All that I wish to say is that India at the outset of her career met with a special combination of circumstances which was not lost upon her. She had, according to her opportunities, thought and pondered, striven and suffered, dived into the depths of existence, and achieved something which surely cannot be without its value to people whose evolution in history took a different way altogether. Man for his perfect growth requires all the living elements that constitute his complex life; that is why his food has to be cultivated in different fields and brought from different sources. Civilization is a kind of mould that each nation is busy making for itself to shape its men and women according to its best ideal. All its institutions, its legislature, its standard of approbation and condemnation, its conscious and unconscious teachings tend toward that object. The modern civilization of the west, by all its organised efforts, is trying to turn out men perfect in physical, intellectual, and moral efficiency. There the vast energies of the nations are employed in extending man's power over his surroundings, and people are combining and straining every faculty to possess and to turn to account all that they can lay their hands upon, to overcome every obstacle on their path of conquest. They are ever disciplining themselves to fight nature and other races; their armaments are getting more and more stupendous every day; their machines, their appliances, their organisations go on multiplying at an amazing rate. This is a splendid achievement, no doubt, and a wonderful manifestation of man's masterfulness, which knows no obstacle and has for its object the supremacy of himself over everything else. The ancient civilization of India had its own ideal of perfection towards which its efforts were directed. Its aim was not attaining power, and it neglected to cultivate to the utmost its capacities, and to organize men for defensive and offensive purposes, for co-operation in the acquisition of wealth and for military and political ascendancy. The ideal that India tried to realize led her best men to the isolation of a contemplative life, and the treasures that she gained for mankind by penetrating into the mysteries of reality cost her dear in the sphere of worldly success. Yet, this also was a sublime achievement, - it was a supreme manifestation of that human aspiration which knows no limit, and which has for its object nothing less than the realization of the Infinite. There were the virtuous, the wise, the courageous; there were the statesmen, kings and emperors of India; but whom amongst all these classes did she look up to and choose to be the representative of men? They were the rishis. What were the rishis? They who having attained the supreme soul in knowledge' were filled with wisdom, and having found him in union with the soul were in perfect harmony with the inner self; they having realized him in the heart were free from all selfish desires, and having experienced him in all the activities of the world, had attained calmness. The rishis were they who having reached the supreme God from all sides had found abiding peace, had become united with all, had entered into the life of the Universe. Thus the state of realising our relationship with all, of entering into everything through union with God, was considered in India to be the ultimate end and fulfilment of humanity. Man can destroy and plunder, earn and accumulate, invent and discover, but he is great because his soul comprehends all. It is dire destruction for him when he envelopes his soul in a dead shell of callous habits, and when a blind fury of works whirls round him like an eddying dust storm, shutting out the horizon. That indeed kills the very spirit of his being, which is the spirit of comprehension. Essentially man is not a slave either of himself or of the world; but he is a lover. His freedom and fulfilment is in love, which is another name for perfect comprehension. By this power of comprehension, this permeation of his being, he is united with the all-pervading Spirit, who is also the breath of his soul. Where a man tries to raise himself to eminence by pushing and jostling all others, to achieve a distinction by which he prides himself to be more than everybody else, there he is alienated from that Spirit. This is why the Upanishads describe those who have attained the goal of human life as 'peaceful' and as 'at-one-with-God,'" meaning that they are in perfect harmony with man and nature, and therefore in undisturbed union with God. We have a glimpse of the same truth in the teachings of Jesus when he says. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven' - which implies that whatever we treasure for ourselves separates us from others; our possessions are our limitations. He who is bent upon accumulating riches is unable, with his ego continually bulging, to pass through the gates of comprehension of the spiritual world, which is the world of perfect harmony; he is shut up within the narrow walls of his limited acquisitions. Hence the spirit of the teachings of the Upanishads is: In order to find him you must embrace all. In the pursuit of wealth you really give up everything to gain a few things, and that is not the way to attain him who is completeness. Some modern philosophers of Europe, who are directly or indirectly indebted to the Upanishads, far from realising their debt, maintain that the Brahma of India is a mere abstraction, a negation of all that is in the world. In a word, that the Infinite Being is to be found nowhere except in metaphysics. It may be, that such a doctrine has been and still is prevalent with a section of our countrymen. But this is certainly not in accord with the pervading spirit of the Indian mind. Instead, it is the practice of realising and affirming the presence of the infinite in all things which has been its constant inspiration. We are enjoined to see whatever there is in the world as being enveloped by God. I bow lo God over and over again who is in fire and in water, who permeates the whole world, who is in the annual crops as well as in the perennial trees. Can this be God abstracted from the world? Instead, it signifies not merely seeing him in all things, but saluting him, in all the objects of the world. The attitude of the God-conscious man of the Upanishad towards the universe is one of a deep feeling of adoration. His object of worship, is present everywhere. It is the one living truth that makes all realities true. This truth is not only of knowledge but of devotion. 'Namonamah,' - we bow to him everywhere, and over and over again. It is recognized in the outburst of the Rishi, who addresses the whole world in a sudden ecstasy of joy: Listen to me, ye sons of the immortal spirit, ye who live in the heavenly abode, I have known the Supreme Person whose light shines forth from beyond the darkness. Do we not find the overwhelming delight of a direct and positive experience where there is not the least trace of vagueness or passivity? Buddha, who developed the practical side of the teaching of the Upanishads, preached the same message when he said, With everything, whether it is above or below, remote or near, visible or invisible, thou shall preserve a relation of unlimited love without any animosity or without a desire to kill. To live in such a consciousness while standing or walking, sitting or lying down till you are asleep, is Brahma vihara, or, in other words, is living and moving and having your joy in the spirit of Brahma. What is that spirit? The Upanishad says, The being who is in his essence the light and life of all, who is world-conscious, is Brahma. To feel all, to be conscious of everything, is his spirit. We are immersed in his consciousness body and soul. It is through his consciousness that the sun attracts the earth; it is through his consciousness that the light-waves are being transmitted from planet to planet. Not only in space, but this light and life, this all-feeling being is in our souls' He is all- conscious in space, or the world of extension; and he is all-conscious in soul, or the world of intension. Thus to attain our world-consciousness, we have to unite our feeling with this all-pervasive infinite feeling. In fact, the only true human progress is coincident with this widening of the range of feeling. All our poetry, philosophy, science, art, and religion are serving to extend the scope of our consciousness towards higher and larger spheres. Man does not acquire rights through occupation of larger space, nor through external conduct, but his rights extend only so far as he is real, and his reality is measured by the scope of his consciousness. We have, however, to pay a price for this attainment of the freedom of consciousness. What is the price? It is to give one's self away. Our soul can realize itself truly only by denying itself. The Upanishad says, Thou shalt gain by giving away,' Thou shalt not covet. In the Gita we are advised to work disinterestedly, abandoning all lust for the result. Many outsiders conclude from this teaching that the conception of the world as something unreal lies at the root of the so-called disinterestedness preached in India. But the reverse is the truth. The man who aims at his own aggrandizement underrates everything else. Compared with himself the rest of the world is unreal. Thus in order to be fully conscious of the reality of all, man has to be free himself from the bonds of personal desires. This discipline we have to go through to prepare ourselves for our social duties - for sharing the burdens of our fellow- beings. Every endeavour to attain a larger life requires of man 'to gain by giving away, and not to be greedy.' And thus to expand gradually the consciousness of one's unity with all is the striving of humanity. The Infinite in India was not a thin nonentity, void of all content. The Rishis of India asserted emphatically, 'To know him in this life is to be true; not to know him in this life is the desolation of death.' How to know him then? 'By realising him in each and all.' Not only in nature, but in the family, in society, and in the state, the more we realize the World-conscious in all, the better for us. Failing to realize this, we turn our faces to destruction. It fills me with great joy and a high hope for the future of humanity when I realize that there was a time in the remote past when our poet-prophets stood under the lavish sunshine of an Indian sky and greeted the world with the glad recognition of kindred. It was not an anthropomorphic hallucination. It was not seeing man reflected everywhere in grotesquely exaggerated images, and witnessing the human drama acted on a gigantic scale in nature's arena of flitting lights and shadows. On the contrary, it meant crossing the limiting barriers of the individual, to become more than man, to become one with the All. It was not a mere play of the imagination, but it was the liberation of consciousness from all the mystifications and exaggerations of the self. These ancient seers felt in the serene depth of their mind that the same energy, which vibrates and passes into the endless forms of the world, manifests itself in our inner being as consciousness; and there is no break in unity. For these seers there was no gap in their luminous vision of perfection. They never acknowledged even death itself as creating a chasm in the field of reality. They said, His reflection is death as well as immortality. They did not recognize any essential opposition between life and death, and they said with absolute assurance. It is life that is death.' They saluted with the same serenity of gladness 'life in its aspect of appearing and in its aspect of departure' - Then which is past is hidden in life, and that which is to come. They knew that mere appearance and disappearance are on the surface like waves on the sea, but life which is permanent knows no decay or diminution. Everything has sprung from immortal life and is vibrating with life, for life is immense. This is the noble heritage from our forefathers waiting to be claimed by us as our own, this ideal of the supreme freedom of consciousness. It is not merely intellectual or emotional, it has an ethical basis, and it must be translated into action. In the Upanishad it is said, The supreme being is all-pervading, therefore he is the innate good in all.' To be truly united in knowledge, love, and service with all beings, and thus to realize one's self in the all- pervading God is the essence of goodness, and this is the keynote of the teachings of the Upanishads: Life is immense! Self - consciousness We have seen that it was the aspiration of ancient India to live and move and have its joy in Brahma, the all-conscious and all-pervading Spirit, by extending its field of consciousness over all the world. But that, it may be urged, is an impossible task for man to achieve. If this extension of consciousness be an outward process, then it is endless; it is like attempting to cross the ocean after ladling out its water. By beginning to try to realize all, one has to end by realising nothing. But, in reality, it is not so absurd as it sounds. Man has every day to solve this problem of enlarging his region and adjusting his burdens. His burdens are many, too numerous for him to carry, but he knows that by adopting a system he can lighten the weight of his load. Whenever they feel too complicated and unwieldy, he knows it is because he has not been able to hit upon the system which would have set everything in place and distributed the weight evenly. This search for system is really a search for unity, for synthesis; it is our attempt to harmonise the heterogeneous complexity of outward materials by an inner adjustment. In the search we gradually become aware that to find out the One is to possess the All; that there, indeed, is our last and highest privilege. It is based on the law of that unity which is, if we only know it, our abiding strength. Its living principle is the power that is in truth; the truth of that unity which comprehends multiplicity. Facts are many, but the truth is one. The animal intelligence knows facts, the human mind has power to apprehend truth. The apple falls from the tree, the rain descends upon the earth - you can go on burdening your memory with such facts and never come to an end. But once you get hold of the law of gravitation you can dispense with the necessity of collecting facts ad infinitum. You have got at one truth which governs numberless facts. This discovery of a truth is pure joy to man - it is a liberation of his mind. For, a mere fact is like a blind lane, it leads only to itself - it has no beyond. But a truth opens up a whole horizon, it leads us to the infinite. That is the reason why, when a man like Darwin discovers some simple general truth about Biology, it does not stop there, but like a lamp shedding its light far beyond the object for which it was lighted, it illumines the whole region of human life and thought, transcending its original purpose. Thus we find that truth, while investing all facts, is not a mere aggregate of facts - it surpasses them on all sides and points to the infinite reality. As in the region of knowledge so in that of consciousness, man must clearly realize some central truth which will give him an outlook over the widest possible field. And that is the object which the Upanishad has in view when it says, Know thine own Soul. Or, in other words, realize the one great principle of unity that there is in every man. All our egoistic impulses, our selfish desires, obscure our true vision of the soul. For they only indicate our own narrow self. When we are conscious of our soul, we perceive the inner being that transcends our ego and has its deeper affinity with the All. Children, when they begin to learn each separate letter of the alphabet, find no pleasure in it, because they miss the real purpose of the lesson; in fact, while letters claim our attention only in themselves and as isolated things, they fatigue us. They become a source of joy to us only when they combine into words and sentences and convey an idea. Likewise, our soul when detached and imprisoned within the narrow limits of a self loses its significance. For its very essence is unity. It can only find out its truth by unifying itself with others, and only then it has its joy. Man was troubled and he lived in a state of fear so long as he had not discovered the uniformity of law in nature; till then the world was alien to him. The law that he discovered is nothing but the perception of harmony that prevails between reason, which is the soul of man, and the workings of the world. This is the bond of union through which man is related to the world in which he lives, and he feels an exceeding joy when he finds this out, for then he realizes himself in his surroundings. To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own, and it is the discovery of ourselves outside us which makes us glad. This relation of understanding is partial, but the relation of love is complete. In love the sense of difference is obliterated and the human soul fulfils its purpose in perfection, transcending the limits of itself and reaching across the threshold of the infinite. Therefore love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at one with the All. This principle of unity which man has in his soul is ever active, establishing relations far and wide through literature, art, and science, society, state- craft, and religion. Our great Revealers are they who make manifest the true meaning of the soul by giving up self for the love of mankind. They face calumny and persecution, deprivation and death in their service of love. They live the life of the soul, not of the self, and thus they prove to us the ultimate truth of humanity. We call them Mahatmas, 'the men of the great soul.' It is said in one of the Upanishads: It is not that thou lovest thy son because thou desirest him, but thou lovest thy son because thou desirest thine own soul. The meaning of this is, that whomsoever we love, in him we find our own soul in the highest sense. The final truth of our existence lies in this. Paramatma, the supreme soul, is in me, as well as in my son, and my joy in my son is the realization of this truth. It has become quite a commonplace fact, yet it is wonderful to think upon, that the joys and sorrows of our loved ones are joys and sorrows to us - nay, they are more. Why so? Because in them we have grown larger, in them we have touched that great truth which comprehends the whole universe. It very often happens that our love for our children, our friends, or other loved ones, debars us from the further realization of our soul. It enlarges our scope of consciousness, no doubt, yet it sets a limit to its freest expansion. Nevertheless it is the first step, and all the wonder lies in this first step itself. It shows to Us the true nature of our soul. From it we know, for certain, that our highest joy is in the losing of our egoistic self and in the uniting with others. This love gives us a new power and insight and beauty of mind to the extent of the limits we set around it, but ceases to do so if those limits lose their elasticity, and militate against the spirit of love altogether; then our friend- ships become exclusive, our families selfish and inhospitable, our nations insular and aggressively inimical to other races. It is like putting a burning light within a sealed enclosure, which shines brightly till the poisonous gases accumulate and smother the flame. Nevertheless it has proved its truth before it dies, and made known the joy of freedom from the grip of the darkness, blind and empty and cold. According to the Upanishads, the key to cosmic consciousness, to God- consciousness, is in the consciousness of the soul. To know our soul apart from the self is the first step towards the realization of the supreme deliverance. We must know with absolute certainty that essentially we are spirit. This we can do by winning mastery over self, by rising above all pride and greed and fear, by knowing that worldly losses and physical death can take nothing away from the truth and the greatness of our soul. The chick knows when it breaks through the self-centred isolation of its egg that the hard shell which covered it so long was not really a part of its life. That shell is a dead thing, it has no growth, it affords no glimpse whatever of the vast beyond that lies outside it. However pleasantly perfect and rounded it may be, it must be given a blow to, it must be burst through and thereby the freedom of light and air be won, and the complete purpose of bird life be achieved. In Sanskrit, the bird has been called the twice-born: so too the man is named, who has gone through the ceremony of the discipline of self-restraint and high thinking for a period of at least twelve years; who has come out simple in wants, pure in heart, and ready to take up all the responsibilities of life in a disinterested largeness of spirit. He is considered to have had his rebirth from the blind envelopment of self to the freedom of soul life; to have come into living relation with his surroundings; to have become at one with the All. I have already warned my hearers, and must once more warn them against the idea that the teachers of India preached a renunciation of the world and of self which leads only to the blank emptiness of negation. Their aim was the realization of the soul, or, in other words, gaining the world in perfect truth. When Jesus said, 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,' he meant this. He proclaimed the truth that when man gets rid of his pride of self then he comes into his true inheritance. No more has he to fight his way into his position in the world; it is secure for him everywhere by the immortal right of his soul. Pride of self interferes with the proper function of the soul which is to realize, itself by perfecting its union with the world and the world's God. In his sermon to Sadhu Simha Buddha says, It is true, Simha, that I denounce activities, but only the activities that lead to the evil in words, thoughts, or deeds. It is true, Simha, that I preach extinction, but only the extinction of pride, lust, evil thought, and ignorance, not that of forgiveness, love, charity, and truth. The doctrine of deliverance that Buddha preached was the freedom from the thraldom of avidya. Avidya is the ignorance that darkens our consciousness, and tends to limit it within the boundaries of our personal self. It is this avidya, this ignorance, this limiting of consciousness that creates the hard separateness of the ego, and thus becomes the source of all pride and greed and cruelty incidental to self-seeking. When a man sleeps he is shut up within the narrow activities of his physical life. He lives, but he knows not the varied relations of his life to his surroundings, - therefore he knows not himself. So when a man lives the life of Avidya he is confined within his own self. It is a spiritual sleep; his consciousness is not fully awake to the highest reality that surrounds him, therefore he knows not the reality of his own soul. When he attains Bodhi, i.e. the awakenment from the sleep of self to the perfection of consciousness, he becomes Buddha. Once I met two ascetics of a certain religious sect in a village of Bengal. 'Can you tell me,' I asked them, 'wherein lies the special features of your religion?' One of them hesitated for a moment and answered, It is difficult to define that.' The other said, 'No, it is quite simple. We hold that we have first of all to know our own soul under the guidance of our spiritual teacher, and when we have done that we can find him, who is the Supreme Soul, within us.' 'Why don't you preach your doctrine to all the people of the world?' I asked. 'Whoever feels thirsty will of himself come to the river,' was his reply. 'But then, do you find it so? Are they coming?' The man gave a gentle smile, and with an assurance which had not the least tinge of impatience or anxiety, he said, 'They must come, one and all.' Yes, he is right, this simple ascetic of rural Bengal. Man is indeed abroad to satisfy needs which are more to him than food and clothing. He is out to find himself. Man's history is the history of his journey to the unknown in quest of the realization of his immortal self - his soul. Through the rise and fall of empires; through the building up gigantic piles of wealth and the ruthless scattering of them upon the dust; through the creation of vast bodies of symbols that give shape to his dreams and aspirations, and the casting of them away like the playthings of an outworn infancy; through his forging of magic keys with which to unlock the mysteries of creation, and through his throwing away of this labour of ages to go back to his workshop and work up afresh some new form; yes, through it all man is marching from epoch to epoch towards the fullest realization of his soul, - the soul which is greater than the things man accumulates, the deeds he accomplishes, the theories he builds, the soul whose onward course is never checked by death or dissolution. Man's mistakes and failures have by no means been trifling or small, they have strewn his path with colossal ruins; his sufferings have been immense, like birth-pangs for a giant child; they are the prelude of a fulfilment whose scope is infinite. Man has gone through and is still undergoing martyrdoms in various ways, and his institutions are the altars he has built whereto he brings his daily sacrifices, marvellous in kind and stupendous in quantity. All this would be absolutely unmeaning and unbearable if all along he did not feel that deepest joy of the soul within him, which tries its divine strength by suffering and proves its exhaustless riches by renunciation. Yes, they are coming, the pilgrims, one and all - coming to their true inheritance of the world; they are ever broadening their consciousness, ever seeking a higher and higher unity, ever approaching nearer to the one central Truth which is all-comprehensive. Man's poverty is abysmal, his wants are endless till he becomes truly conscious of his soul. Till then, the world to him is in a state of continual flux - a phantasm that is and is not. For a man who has realized his soul there is a determinate centre of the universe around which all else can find its proper place, and from thence only can he draw and enjoy the blessedness of a harmonious life. There was a time when the earth was only a nebulous mass whose particles were scattered far apart through the expanding force of heat; when she had not yet attained her definiteness of form and had neither beauty nor purpose, but only heat and motion. Gradually, when her vapours were condensed into a unified rounded whole through a force that strove to bring all straggling matters under the control of a centre, she occupied her proper place among the planets of the solar system, like an emerald pendant in a necklace of diamonds. So with our soul. When the heat and motion of blind impulses and passions distract it on all sides, we can neither give nor receive anything truly. But when we find our centre in our soul by the power of self-restraint, by the force that harmonises all warring elements and unifies those that are apart, then all our isolated impressions reduce themselves to wisdom, and all our momentary impulses of heart find their completion in love; then all the petty details of our life reveal an infinite purpose, and all our thoughts and deeds unite themselves inseparably in an internal harmony. The Upanishads say with great emphasis, Know thou the One, the Soul. It is the bridge leading to the immortal being. This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom. His desires are many, and madly they run after the varied objects of the world, for therein they have their life and fulfilment. But that which is one in him is ever seeking for unity - unity in knowledge, unity in love, unity in purposes of will; its highest joy is when it reaches the infinite one within its eternal unity. Hence the saying of the Upanishad, Only those of tranquil minds, and none else, can attain abiding joy, by realising within their souls the Being who manifests one essence in a multiplicity of forms. Through all the diversities of the world the one in us is threading .its course towards the one in all; this is its nature and this is its joy. But by that devious path it could never reach its goal if it had not a light of its own by which it could catch in a flash the sight of what it was seeking. The vision of the Supreme One in our own soul is a direct and immediate intuition, not based on any ratiocination or demonstration at all. Our eyes naturally see an object as a whole, not by breaking it up into parts, but by bringing all the parts together into a unity with ourselves. So with the intuition of our Soul-consciousness, which naturally and totally realizes its unity in the Supreme One. Says the Upanishad: This deity who is manifesting himself in the activities of the universe always dwells in the heart of man as the supreme soul. Those who realize him through the immediate perception of the heart attain immortality. He is Vishvakarma; that is, in a multiplicity of forms and forces lies his outward manifestation in nature; but his inner manifestation in our soul is that which exists in unity. Our pursuit of truth in the domain of nature therefore is through analysis and the gradual methods of science, but our apprehension of truth in our soul is immediate and through direct intuition. We cannot attain the supreme soul by successive additions of knowledge acquired bit by bit even through all eternity, because he is one, he is not made up of parts; we can only know him as heart of our hearts and soul of our soul; we can only know him in the love and joy we feel when we give up our self and stand before him face to face. The deepest and the most earnest prayer that has ever risen from the human heart has been uttered in our ancient tongue: O thou self-revealing one, reveal thyself in me. We are in misery because we are creatures of self - the self that is unyielding and narrow, that reflects no light, that is blind to the infinite. Our self is loud with its own discordant clamour - it is not the tuned harp whose chords vibrate with the music of the eternal. Sighs of discontent and weariness of failure, idle regrets for the past and anxieties for the future are troubling our shallow hearts because we have not found our souls, and the self- revealing spirit has not been manifest within us. Hence our cry, O thou awful one, save me with thy smile of grace ever and evermore. It is a stifling shroud of death, this self-gratification, this insatiable greed, this pride of possession, this insolent alienation of heart. Rudra, O thou awful are, rend this dark cover in twain and let the saving beam of thy smile of grace strike through this night of gloom and waken my soul. From unreality lead me to the real, from darkness to the light, from death to immortality." But how can one hope to have this prayer granted? For infinite is the distance that lies between truth and untruth, between death and deathlessness. Yet this measureless gulf is bridged in a moment when the self- revealing one reveals himself in the soul. There the miracle happens, for there is the meeting-ground of the finite and infinite. Father, completely sweep away all my sins! For in sin man takes part with the finite against the infinite that is in him. It is the defeat of his soul by his self. It is a perilously losing game, in which man stakes his all to gain a part. Sin is the blurring of truth which clouds the purity of our consciousness. In sin we lust after pleasures, not because they are truly desirable, but because the red light of our passion makes them appear desirable; we long for things not because they are great in themselves, but because our greed exaggerates them and makes them appear great. These exaggerations, these falsifications of the perspective of things, break the harmony of our life at every step; we lose the true standard of values and are distracted by the false claims of the varied interests of life contending with one another. It is this failure to bring all the elements of his nature under the unity and control of the Supreme One that makes man feel the pang of his separation from God and gives rise to the earnest prayer, 0 God, 0 Father, completely sweep away all our sins. Give into us that which is good, the good which is the daily bread of our souls. In our pleasures we are confined to ourselves, in the good we are freed and we belong to all. As the child in its mother's womb gets its sustenance through the union of its life with the larger life of its mother, so our soul is nourished only through the good which is the recognition of its inner kinship, the channel of its communication with the infinite by which it is surrounded and fed. Hence it is said, 'Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.' For righteousness is the divine food of the soul; nothing but this can untruth and unrighteousness hold its reign; and things can come to such a pass that we may cry out in our anguish, 'Such utter lawlessness could never prevail if there were a God! Indeed, God has stood aside from our self, where his watchful patience knows no bounds, and where he never forces open the doors if shut against him. For this self of ours has to attain its ultimate meaning, which is the soul, not through the compulsion of God's power but through love, and thus become united with God in freedom. He whose spirit has been made one with God stands before man as the supreme flower of humanity. There man finds in truth what he is; for there the Avih is revealed to him in the soul of man as the most perfect revelation for him of God; for there we see the union of the supreme will with our will, our love with the love everlasting. Therefore, in our country he who truly loves God receives such homage from men as would be considered almost sacrilegious in the west. We see in him God's wish fulfilled, the most difficult of all obstacles to his revealment removed, and God's own perfect joy fully blossoming in humanity. Through him we find the whole world of man overspread with a divine homeliness. His life, burning with God's love, makes all our earthly love resplendent. All the intimate associations of our life, all its experience of pleasure and pain, group themselves around this display of the divine love, and form the drama that we witness in him. The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music. The trees and the stars and the blue hills appear to us as symbols aching with a meaning which can never be uttered in words. We seem to watch the Master in the very act of creation of a new world when a man's soul draws her heavy curtain of self aside, when her veil is lifted and she is face to face with her eternal lover. But what is this state? It is like a morning of spring, varied in its life and beauty, yet one and entire. When a man's life rescued from distractions finds its unity in the soul, then the consciousness of the infinite becomes at once direct and natural to it as the light is to the flame. All the conflicts and contradictions of life are reconciled; knowledge, love, and action harmonized; pleasure and pain become one in beauty, enjoyment and renunciation equal in goodness; the breach between the finite and the infinite fills with love and overflows; every moment carries its message of the eternal: the formless appears to us in the form of the flower, of the fruit; the boundless takes us up in his arms as a father and walks by our side as a friend. It is only the soul, the one in man which by its very nature can overcome all limits, and finds its affinity with the Supreme One. While yet we have not attained the internal harmony, and the wholeness of our being, our life remains a life of habits. The world still appears to us as a machine, to be mastered where it is useful, to be guarded against where it is dangerous, and never to be known in its full fellowship with us alike in its physical nature and in its spiritual life and beauty. The problem of evil THE QUESTION WHY there is evil in existence is the same as why there is imperfection, or, in other words, why there is creation at all. We must take it for granted that it could not be otherwise; that creation must be imperfect, must be gradual, and that it is futile to ask the question, Why are we? But this is the real question we ought to ask: Is this imperfection the final truth, is evil absolute and ultimate? The river has its boundaries, its banks, but is a river all banks? Or are the banks the final facts about the river? Do not these obstructions themselves give its water an onward motion? The towing rope binds a boat, but is the bondage its meaning? Does it not at the same time draw the boat forward? The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement, which is towards perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love. The idea of God that man has in his being is the wonder of all wonders. He has felt in the depths of his life that what appears as imperfect is the manifestation of the perfect; just as a man who has an ear for music realizes the perfection of a song, while in fact he is only listening to a succession of notes. Man has found out the great paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits; it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness; finitude is not contradictory to infinity: they are but completeness manifested in parts, infinity revealed within bounds. Pain, which is the feeling of our finiteness, is not a fixture in our life. It is not an end in self, as joy is. To meet with it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of creation. It is what error is in our intellectual life. To go through the history of the development of science is to go through the maze of mistakes it made current at different times. Yet no one really believes that science is the one perfect mode of disseminating mistakes. The progressive ascertainment of truth is the important thing to remember in the history of science, not its innumerable mistakes. Error, by its nature, cannot be stationary; it cannot remain with truth; like a tramp, it must quit its lodging as soon as it fails to pay its score to the full. As in intellectual error, so in evil of any other form, its essence is impermanence, for it cannot accord with the whole. Every moment it is being corrected by the totality of things and keeps changing its aspect. We exaggerate its importance by imagining it as at a standstill. Could we collect the statistics of the immense amount of death and putrefaction happening every moment in this earth, they would appeal us. But evil is ever moving; with all its incalculable immensity it does not effectually clog the current of our life; and we find that the earth, water, and air remain sweet and pure for living beings. All such statistics consist of our attempts to represent statically what is in motion; and in the process things assume a weight in our mind which they have not in reality. For this reason a man, who by his profession is concerned with any particular aspect of life, is apt to magnify its proportions; in laying undue stress upon facts he loses his hold upon truth. A detective may have the opportunity of studying crimes in detail, but he loses his sense of their relative place in the whole social economy. When science collects facts to illustrate the struggle for existence that is going on in the animal kingdom, it raises a picture in our minds of 'nature red in tooth and claw.' But in these mental pictures we give a fixity to colours and forms which are really evanescent. It is like calculating the weight of the air on each square inch of our body to prove that it must be crushingly heavy for us. With every weight, however, there is an adjustment, and we lightly bear our burden. With the struggle for existence in nature there is reciprocity. There is the love for children and for comrades; there is the sacrifice of self, which springs from love; and this love is the positive element in life. If we kept the search-light of our observation turned upon the fact of death, the world would appear to us like a huge charnel-house; but in the world of life the thought of death has, we find, the least possible hold upon our minds. Not because it is the least apparent, but because it is the negative aspect of life; just as, in spite of the fact that we shut our eyelids ever)' second, it is the openings of the eyes that count. Life as a whole never takes death seriously. It laughs, dances and plays, it builds, hoards and loves in death's face. Only when we detach one individual fact of death do we see its blankness and become dismayed. We lose sight of the wholeness of a life of which death is part. It is like looking at a piece of cloth through a microscope. It appears like a net; we gaze at the big holes and shiver in imagination. But the truth is, death is not the ultimate reality. It looks black, as the sky looks blue; but it does not blacken existence, just as the sky does not leave its stain upon the wings of the bird. When we watch a child trying to walk, we see its countless failures; its successes are but few. If we had to limit our observation within a narrow space of time, the sight would be cruel. But we find that in spite of its repeated failures there is an impetus of joy in the child which sustains it in its seemingly impossible task. We see it does not think of its falls so much as of its power to keep its balance though for only a moment. Like these accidents in a child's attempts to walk, we meet with sufferings in various forms in our life every day, showing the imperfections in our knowledge and our available power, and in the application of our will. But if these revealed our weakness to us only, we should die of utter depression. When we select for observation a limited area of our activities, our individual failures and miseries loom large in our minds; but our life leads us instinctively to take a wider view. It gives us an ideal of perfection which ever carries us beyond our present limitations. Within us we have a hope which always walks in front of our present narrow experience; it is the undying faith in the infinite in us; it will never accept any of our disabilities as a permanent fact; it sets no limit to its own scope; it dares to assert that man has oneness with God; and its wild dreams become true every day. We see the truth when we set our mind towards the infinite. The ideal of truth is not in the narrow present, not in our immediate sensations, but in the consciousness of the whole which gives us a taste of what we should have in what we do have. Consciously or unconsciously we have in our life this feeling of Truth which is ever larger than its appearance; for our life is facing the infinite, and it is in movement. Its aspiration is therefore infinitely more than its achievement, and as it goes on it finds that no realization of truth ever leaves it stranded on the desert of finality, but carries it to a region beyond. Evil cannot altogether arrest the course of life on the highway and rob it of its possessions. For the evil has to pass on, it has to grow into good; it cannot stand and give battle to the All. If the least evil could stop anywhere indefinitely, it would sink deep and cut into the very roots of existence. As it is, man does not really believe in evil, just as he cannot believe that violin strings have been purposely made to create the exquisite torture of discordant notes, though by the aid of statistics it can be mathematically proved that the probability of discord is far greater than that of harmony, and for one who can play the violin there are thousands who cannot. The potentiality of perfection outweighs actual contradictions. No doubt there have been people who asserted existence to be an absolute evil, but man can never take them seriously. Their pessimism is a mere pose, either intellectual or sentimental, but life itself is optimistic: it wants to go on. Pessimism is a form of mental dipsomania, it disdains healthy nourishment, indulges in the strong drink of denunciation, and creates an artificial dejection which thirsts for a stronger draught. If existence were an evil, it would wait for no philosopher to prove it. It is like convicting a man of suicide, while all the time he stands before you in the flesh. Existence itself is here to prove that it cannot be an evil. An imperfection which is not all imperfection, but which has perfection for its ideal, must go through a perpetual realization. Thus, it is the function of our intellect to realize the truth through untruths, and knowledge is nothing but the continually burning up of error to set free the light of truth. Our will, our character, has to attain perfection by continually overcoming evils, either inside or outside us, or both; our physical life is consuming bodily materials every moment to maintain the life fire; and our moral life too has its fuel to burn. This life process is going on - we know it, we have felt it; and we have a faith which no individual instances to the contrary can shake, that the direction of humanity is from evil to good. For we feel that good is the positive element in man's nature, and in every age and every clime what man values most is his ideal of goodness. We have known the good, we have loved it, and we have paid our highest reverence to men who have shown in their lives what goodness is. The question will be asked, What is goodness; what does our moral nature mean? My answer is, that when a man begins to have an extended vision of his true self, when he realizes that he is much more than at present he seems to be, he begins to get conscious of his moral nature. Then he grows aware of that which he is yet to be, and the state not yet experienced by him becomes more real than that under his direct experience. Necessarily, his perspective of life changes, and his will takes the place of his wishes. For will is the supreme wish of the larger life, the life whose greater portion is out of our present reach, whose objects are not for the most part before our sight. Then comes the conflict of our lesser man with our greater man, of our wishes with our will, of the desire for things affecting our senses with the purpose that is within our heart. Then we begin to distinguish between what we immediately desire and what is good. For good is that which is desirable for our greater self. Thus the sense of goodness comes out of a truer view of our life, which is the connected view of the wholeness of the field of life, and which takes into account not only what is present before us but what is not, and perhaps never humanly can be. Man, who is provident, feels for that life of his which is not yet existent, feels much more for that than for the life that is with him; therefore he is ready to sacrifice his present inclination for the unrealized future. In this he becomes great, for he realizes truth. Even to be efficiently selfish a man has to recognize this truth, and has to curb his immediate impulses - in other words, has to be moral. For our moral faculty is the faculty by which we know that life is not made up of fragments, purposeless and discontinuous. This moral sense of man not only gives him the power to see that the self has a continuity in time, but it also enables him to see that he is not true when he is only restricted to his own self. He is more in truth than he is in fact. He truly belongs to individuals who are not included in his own individuality, and whom he is never even likely to know. As he has a feeling for his future self which is outside his present consciousness, so he has a feeling for his greater self which is outside the limits of his personality. There is no man who has not this feeling to some extent, who has never sacrificed his selfish desire for the sake of some other person, who has never felt a pleasure in undergoing some loss or trouble because it pleased somebody else. It is a truth that man is not a detached being, that he has a universal aspect; and when he recognizes this, he becomes great. Even the most evilly-disposed selfishness has to recognize this when he seeks the power to do evil; for it cannot ignore truth and yet be strong. So in order to claim the aid of truth, selfishness has to be unselfish to some extent. A band of robbers must be moral in order to hold together as a band; they may rob the whole world but not each other. To make an immoral intention successful, some of its weapons must be moral. In fact, very often it is our very moral strength which gives us most effectively the power to do evil, to exploit other individuals for our own benefit, to rob other people of their just rights. The life of an animal is unmoral, for it is aware only of an immediate present; the life of a man can be immoral, but that only means that it must have a moral basis. What is immoral is imperfectly moral just as what is false is true to a small extent, or it cannot even be false. Not to see is to be blind, but to see wrongly is to see only in an imperfect manner. Man's selfishness is a beginning to see some connection, some purpose in life; and to act in accordance with its dictates requires self- restraint and regulation of conduct. A selfish man willingly undergoes troubles for the sake of the self, he suffers hardship and privation without a murmur, simply because he knows that what is pain and trouble, looked at from the point of view of a short space of time, is just the opposite when seen in a larger perspective. Thus what is a loss to the smaller man is a gain to the greater, and vice versa. To the man who lives for an idea, for his country for the good of humanity, life has an extented meaning, and to that extent pain becomes important to him. To live the life of goodness is to live the life of all. Pleasure is for one's own self, but goodness is concerned with the happiness of all humanity and for all time. From the point of view of the good, pleasure and pain appear in a different meaning; so much so, that pleasure may be shunned, and pain be courted in its place, and death itself be made welcome as giving a higher value to life. From these higher standpoints of a man's life, the standpoints of the good, pleasure and pain lose their absolute value. Martyrs prove it in history, and we prove it every day in our life in our little martyrdoms. When we take a pitchersful of water from the sea it has its weight, but when we take a dip into the sea itself a thousand pitchersful of water flow above our head, and we do not feel their weight. We have to carry the pitcher of self with our strength; and so, while on the plane of selfishness pleasure and pain have their full weight, on the moral plane they are so much lightened that the man who has reached it appears to us almost super-human in his patience under crushing trials, and his forbearance in the face of malignant persecution. To live in perfect goodness is to realize one's life in the infinite. This is the most comprehensive view of life which we can have by our inherent power of the moral vision of the wholeness of life. And the teaching of Buddha is to cultivate this moral power to the highest extent, to know that our field of activities is not bound to the plane of our narrow self. This is the vision of the heavenly kingdom of Christ. When we attain to that universal life, which is the moral life, we become free from bonds of pleasure and pain, and the place vacated by our self becomes filled with an unspeakable joy which springs from measureless love. In this state the soul's activity is all the more heightened, only its motive power is not from desires, but in its own joy. This is the Karma-yoga of the Gita, the way to become one with the infinite activity by the exercise of the activity of disinterested goodness. When Buddha meditated upon the way of releasing mankind from the grip of misery he came to this truth: that when man attains his highest end by merging the individual in the universal, he becomes free from the thraldom of pain. Let us consider this point more fully. This is what needs repeating here. We have to keep in mind that our individuality by its nature is impelled to seek for the universal. Our body can only die if it tries to eat its own substance, and our eye loses the meaning of its function if it can only see itself. Just as we find that the stronger the imagination the less is it merely imaginary and the more is it in harmony with truth, so we see the more vigorous our individuality the more does it widen towards the universal. For the greatness of a personality is not in itself but in its content, which is universal, just as the depth of a lake is judged not by the size of its cavity but by the depth of its water. So, if it is a truth that the yearning of our nature is for reality, and that our personality cannot be happy with a fantastic universe of its own creation, then it is clearly best for it that our will can only deal with things by following their law, and cannot do with them just as it pleases. This unyielding sureness of reality sometimes crosses our will, and very often leads us to disaster, just as the firmness of the earth invariably hurts the falling child who is learning to walk. Nevertheless it is the same firmness that hurts him which makes his walking possible. Once, while passing under a bridge, the mast of my boat got stuck in one of its girders. If only for a moment the mast would have bent an inch or two, or the bridge raised its back like a yawning cat, or the river given in, it would have been all right with me. But they took no notice of my helplessness. That is the very reason why I could make use of the river, and sail upon it with the help of the mast, and that is why, when its current was inconvenient, I could rely upon the bridge. Things are what they are, and we have to know them if we would deal with them, and knowledge of them is possible because our wish is not their law. This knowledge is a joy to us, for the knowledge is one of the channels of our relation with the things outside us; it is making them our own, and thus widening the limit of our self. At every step we have to take into account others than ourselves. For only in death are we alone. A poet is a true poet when he can make his personal idea joyful to all men, which he could not do if he had not a medium common to all his audience. This common language has its own law which the poet must discover and follow, by doing which he becomes true and attains poetical immortality. We see then that man's individuality is not his highest truth; there is that in him which is universal. If he were made to live in a world where his own self was the only factor to consider, then that would be the worst prison imaginable to him, for man's deepest joy is in growing greater and greater by more and more union with the all. This, as we have seen, would be an impossibility if there were no law common to all. Only by discovering the law and following it, do we become great, do we realize the universal; while, so long as our individual desires are at conflict with the universal law, we suffer pain and are futile. There was a time when we prayed for special concessions, we expected that the laws of nature should be held in abeyance for our own convenience. But now we know better. We know that law cannot be set aside, and in this knowledge we have become strong. For this law is not something apart from us; it is our own. The universal power which is manifested in the universal law is one with our own power. It will thwart us where we are small, where we are against the current of things; but it will help us where we are great, where we are in unison with the all. Thus, through the help of science, as we come to know more of the laws of nature, we gain in power; we tend to attain a universal body. Our organ of sight, our organ of locomotion, our physical strength becomes world-wide; steam and electricity become our nerve and muscle. Thus we find that, just as throughout our bodily organisation there is a principle of relation by virtue of which we can call the entire body our own, and can use it as such, so all through the universe there is that principle of uninterrupted relation by virtue of which we can call the whole world our extended body and use it accordingly. And in this age of science it is our endeavour fully to establish our claim to our world-self. We know all our poverty and sufferings are owing to our inability to realize this legitimate claim of ours. Really, there is no limit to our powers, for we are not outside the universal power which is the expression of universal law. We are on our way, to overcome disease and death, to conquer pain and poverty; for through scientific knowledge we are ever on our way to realize the universal in its physical aspect. And as we make progress we find that pain, disease, and poverty of power are not absolute, but that it is only the want of adjustment of our individual self to our universal self which gives rise to them. It is the same with our spiritual life. When the individual man in us chafes against the lawful rule of the universal man we become morally small, and we must suffer. In such a condition our successes are our greatest failures, and the very fulfilment of our desires leaves us poorer. We banker after special gains for ourselves, we want to enjoy privileges which none else can share with us. But everything that is absolutely special must keep up a perpetual warfare with what is general. In such a state of civil war man always lives behind barricades, and in any civilization which is selfish our homes are not real homes, but artificial barriers around us. Yet we complain that we are not happy, as if there were something inherent in the nature of things to make us miserable. The universal spirit is waiting to crown us with happiness, but our individual spirit would not accept it. It is our life of the self that causes conflicts and complications everywhere, upsets the normal balance of society and gives rise to miseries of all kinds. It brings things to such a pass that to maintain order we have to create artificial coercions and organized forms of tyranny, and tolerate infernal institutions in our midst, whereby at every moment humanity is humiliated. We have seen that in order to be powerful we have to submit to the laws of the universal forces, and to realize in practice that they are our own. So, in order to be happy, we have to submit our individual will to the sovereignty of the universal will, and to feel in truth that it is our own will. When we reach that state wherein the adjustment of the finite in us to the infinite is made perfect, then pain itself becomes a valuable asset. It becomes a measuring rod with which to gauge the true value of our joy. The most important lesson that man can learn from his life is not that there is pain in this world, but that it depends upon him to turn it into good account, that it is possible for him to transmute it into joy. That lesson has not been lost altogether to us, and there is no man living who would willingly be deprived of his right to suffer pain, for that is his right to be a man. One day the wife of a poor labourer complained bitterly to me that her eldest boy was going to be sent away to a rich relative's house for part of the year. It was the implied kind intention of trying to relieve her of her trouble that gave her the shock, for a mother's trouble is a mother's own by her inalienable right of love, and she was not going to surrender it to any dictates of expediency. Man's freedom is never in being saved troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element in his joy. It can be made so only when we realize that our individual self is not the highest meaning of our being, that in us we have the world-man who is immortal, who is not afraid of death or sufferings, and who looks upon pain as only the other side of joy. He who has realized this knows that it is pain which is our true wealth as imperfect beings, and has made us great and worthy to take our seat with the perfect. He knows that we are not beggars; that it is the hard coin which must be paid for everything valuable in this life, for our power, our wisdom, our love; that in pain is symbolised the infinite possibility of perfection, the eternal unfolding of joy; and the man who loses all pleasure in accepting pain sinks down and down to the lowest depth of penury and degradation. It is only when we invoke the aid of pain for our self-gratification that she becomes evil and takes her vengeance for the insult done to her by hurling us into misery. For she is the vestal virgin consecrated to the service of the immortal perfection, and when she takes her true place before the altar of the infinite she casts off her dark veil and bares her face to the beholder as a revelation of supreme joy. An Area of Darkness is a book written by V. S. Naipaul in 1964. It is a travelogue detailing Naipaul's trip through India in the early sixties. It was the first of Naipaul's acclaimed Indian trilogy which includes India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now. The narration is anecdotal and descriptive. A deeply pessimistic work, An Area of Darkness conveys the acute sense of disillusionment which the author experiences on his first visit to his ancestral land. The book was immediately banned in India for its "negative portrayal of India and its people".[1] Nissim Ezekiel wrote the 1984 essay "Naipaul's India and Mine" as a reply to Naipaul's An Area of Darkness. Summary V. S Naipaul has always been a controversial figure. Whether it is for his rude behaviour towards fellow writers at conferences or his show of support for India's Hindutva ring, Bharatiya Janata Party or his admission in his autobiography that his callousness killed his wife, this Trinidadian author has always been some sort of an enfant terrible of English literature. For all his genius, he also remains a vilified figure in India and not without reason. The Area of Darkness, when it was published in 1964, created an uproar among Indians and was intensely criticised for its unkind, deriding and supercilious view of India. Naipaul's literature, much like his personality demonstrates a certain extremism -where there are few or no grey areas. And that is most evident in The Area of Darkness. (His subsequent work, India; A Million Mutinies Now was a far more objective and detailed read -in many ways, this is his best book, apart from A House For Mr Biswas). The book is about how Naipaul built a 'mythical' image about India staying in Trinidad (Naipaul's grandfather was from India and they re-located to West Indies - in a small British colony called Trinidad) and how his one-year visit to India shattered his childhood image of the country. The entire experience is a deeply personal one -- and Naipaul himself behaves like a rather fussy, ungenerous foreign-returned guy(he was just about 30 years old) who criticises the loss of his 'imagined world' without bothering to delve into the reasons for it. This was a plundered country that was struggling to fight its colonial past and tackle some enormous problems at hand.
From the moment he arrives in the country, he applies his own litmus test on it and decides it's a failed nation on every count. So to Naipaul, the weather is oppressive, the poverty is horrifying, people squat defecating all over the place, they serve food with unclean hands, they overcharge customers and what more, even their films don't offer a respite! Naipual has not one good thing to say about the country but doesn't show the slightest hesitation to indulge in gross overstatements and ridiculous generalisations with comments like 'Indians lack in courage...they have been known to go on picknicking on a bank while a stranger drowned' or that 'Indians defecate everywhere' And this is a bit strange considering half the book is dedicated to his three-month long stay in a cozy, pampered House Boat in the picturesque Kashmir valley. Yet, Naipaul sees no beauty in the land! Naipaul makes some very sound points when he talks of India being a country of symbolic, speech-making gestures. Whether it was the '60s or today, action is by way of symbols rather than concrete measures. He's also right to be irritated about Indians and their stubborn unwillingness to see what is obvious. They turn a blind eye to what is painful or disgusting and go about their business like nothing happened. This is important because not much has changed for in India in this respect. They continue to be escapists. Economically of course, the country has progressed by leaps and though I don't share all of Shobhaa De's exuberance on this, India is surging forward more confidently than it ever did. It's difficult to take Naipaul's criticism seriously because most of it seems like an effort to deconstruct the notion of India. There's perverse cynicism at work and the author -while criticising the country's present-- makes no effort to understand its tumultuous recent past or look into its prospects. Hence, even as a piece of work, it remains a highly personal account which unjustly creates and reinforces colonial prejudices.
Two of his observations in particular are condescending and unjustifiable. Naipaul talks of how incongruous India's premier buildings appear in the face of its squalor and poverty. "It is building for the sake of building, creation for the sake of creation....In the North, the ruins (forts etc) speak of waste and failure and the very grandeur of the Mughal buildings is oppressive. Europe has its monuments of Sun-Kings, its Louvres and Versailles. But they are part of the development of a country's spirits." In a display of unimaginable bad faith, he even suggests that the Taj Mahal could be transported slab by slab to United States and re-erected and it would seem wholly admirable. There, he implies that the edifice would serve a meaning. Here, he says, it is only a despot's monument with poverty around it. Again, he talks of how the English language is the 'greatest incongruity of British rule' and has caused 'psychological damage' to the country through its continued official use. English, Naipaul should know was never thrust upon Indians. Other countries resisted it, Indians were attracted to it. Today, India constitutes one of the largest English speaking nations and this has had tremendous impact on its global appeal and economic progress. It's unfortunate that Naipaul chose not to see at all the fascinating side of India- its splendid diversity, it colour and cuisines, its incredible warmth and festivity - which today has made it one of the top most tourist destinations in the world. The only aspect about India Naipaul seems to have really liked is its Railway system which he describes as 'too fine and complex' for a country like India. Phew! Unit:3 DRAMA Soyinka : The Road Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka (Yoruba: Akínwándé Olúwo̩ lé Babátúndé S̩ óyíinká; born 13 July 1934), known as Wole Soyinka (pronounced [wɔlé ʃójĩnká]), is a Nigerian playwright, poet and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature,[2] the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category.[3][a] Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan,[4] and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England.[5] After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections.[6] In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years.[7] Summary The Road is authored by Wole Soyinka, one of the most outspoken contemporary and internationally recognized African writers and intellectuals. Soyinka’s activist stance regarding social, political, and cultural issues concerning human beings, especially Nigerians, is well-known. A testament to this is the twenty-month detention period he underwent, from 1967 to 1969, for his involvement with the Biafran war. His attempt to reconcile the Biafra secessionists and the federal Nigerian government was qualified as an act of treason by Yakubu Gowon, then head of the federal union. During the Abacha years (1993- 1998), Soyinka was obliged to escape Nigeria via the Nadeco Route on a motorcycle following a death sentence pronounced against him in absentia by General Abacha.1 The price he has paid for venturing into the political arena has not deterred him from voicing his belief in a just and dignified society. Soyinka’s involvement with his compatriots’ social life has certainly contributed to giving him an international acclaim, but it seems that his fame is mostly due to his exceptional artistic talents. In addition to being an energetic public figure, Soyinka is a very prolific writer. The man cannot sit still. His characterization by Femi Osofisan as a tiger on stage seems to be an appropriate metaphor to describe this writer. Soyinka appears to enjoy multitasking and trying himself at different things. As a writer, Soyinka has published in almost all literary genres.2 Despite this artistic versatility, one can contend that the novel has not been a particular area of strength or interest for him. He excels as a dramaturge and has written more than twenty plays, and all of them have received considerable attention from scholars. Just as his reputation as a public figure extends beyond the Nigerian borders, so does his fame as a writer. The award of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1986 attests to this. Although Soyinka writes and concerns himself with other issues, one must nonetheless admit that he has devoted a significant part of his career to articulating and giving voice to the Yoruba gods and deities,3 and The Road is one of his plays where this preoccupation with the Yoruba, or perhaps African, spiritualities is prominently reflected. Pouille The Plot Published in 1965, The Road is tragedy and comedy evocative of the Shakespearean style. It dramatizes the lives of a gang of drivers and truck-park layabouts. As underprivileged and uneducated people (only one of them, Professor, is educated) in a city undergoing rapid modernization, they battle with unemployment and seek different ways of making both ends meet. The characters’ subject matter is not only economic and material; they also take a special interest in supernatural matters. They want to understand the concept of the Word to which Professor makes reference and which he compulsively seeks. Some of them think it necessary to make dog-sacrifice rituals for Ogun, the Yoruba god of fire and creativity. They attempt to grasp the mystery that surrounds the character of Murano, regarded by Professor as the living embodiment of the world existing between the realms of the dead and the living. The play ends with the fatal stabbing of Professor by Say Tokyo, one of the lorry drivers, due to the former’s encroachment on the power of Ogun that they all revere. Professor, the Main Protagonist As stated earlier, literary criticism on The Road has devoted much attention to the character Professor, but has also been very critical of him. Scholars’ condemnation of this character hardly goes unnoticed. In “Waiting for the Word,” Probyn describes Professor in a derisive manner, missing what I believe is a sincere desire to find and perhaps possess the Word. Professor’s quest does not amount to mere “messianic schizophrenic” agitations, yet he is further portrayed as a delusional personality who searches for the truth in ridiculous things such as “football pools coupons” and in “secret signposts.”4 Professor’s method of spiritual search seems absurd and deviant to Probyn. One must now ponder the question: are there set, fixed, and “normal” ways of attaining spiritual enlightenment? This absolute and outright condemnation by Probyn in regards to Professor is also found in Ogunba’s comments on the character in The Movement of Transition. 5 For Ogunba, the man is nothing more than a deranged person who should be avoided as he leads those around him into degradation.. According to Ogunba, not much attention should be accorded to Professor, and this undermines and invalidates what seems to be his most crucial existential preoccupation of the moment: his spiritual quest. The discrediting of the character is taken into the material domain. In “Exorcising Faustus from Africa,” Phillips ponders and questions Professor’s commitment to the community. For this scholar, Professor is concerned about nothing more than taking advantage of his community, specifically those who gravitate around him.6 In Phillips’s judgment, Professor is the perfect illustration of an African who has fallen prey to what he calls “Westernized goals,” which, in his judgment, include unethical business relationships, mental abstractions, lack of reverence for the gods, and narcissistic behaviors and objectives. This is an interesting comment because it assumes that all of these so-called Western traits are social trends or foreign habits that cannot be found in the context within which the play takes place, meaning Nigeria or Africa. The author seems so eager to ridicule his object of study that he seems to fall victim to a dualistic method of intellectual inquiry. Phillips places Africans and Westerners on either side of the line and attributes a set of characteristics to each. For him, Westerners are capitalist, un-godly, and rational, which, I assume, defines Africans as non-capitalist, godly, and irrational. Phillips’s comment recalls Senghor’s memorable statement that black people were emotional and white people rational. There is a failure to practice detachment in Phillips’ analysis of Professor that clearly contrasts with Jeyifo’s unemotional evaluation of the character.7 Though Jeyifo draws attention to the rather unusual nature of the Professor and of his mental peculiarities, he nonetheless does not get caught up in an emotional criticism of Professor. His analysis of the character implies a certain detachment that we do not see in Probyn’s, Ogunba’s, or Phillips’s comments. This is not an attempt to undermine the latter’s perspective on the character. Besides, their analyses of Professor are actually condoned by the fact that he is, as some of them say, quite an eccentric character. Professor does stand out for several reasons. He enters the stage in a quite pompous and grandiose manner, dressed in a Victorian style.8 While the outfit does not always say much about the individual’s beliefs and identity, it does in this very instance. By dressing in a Western way, something that in the context of Africa, Pouille 41 particularly in settings similar to the one in which this drama is set, Professor takes on manners usually attributed to the educated classes in Africa, and one can say that at least, in this case, he is not misleading his peers. He seems to display more authenticity as far as the use of the title of professor is concerned. According to Ogunba, there is a social practice within contemporary Nigeria that legitimates the “usurping” of abilities and skills usually associated with “big, high-sounding titles” such as Professor for purposes of self- aggrandizement. While Professor’s use of the title Professor can be legitimated (because he did go to school and was a religious teacher) and differentiated from the way it could be used by one of the horse or bicycle riders that Ogunba alludes to, the reader can still trace the personality cult that the usurpation of the title is purported to foster in Professor’s case. Professor creates a cult around himself with one of his main preoccupations: the Word, defined by Gerald Moore as “the all-creating Word which expresses the indestructible energy of God.”10 This religious, mental, and transcendental interest allows Professor to elevate himself above the rest of the characters with philosophical and religious abstractions that they do not seem to understand. None of them has been schooled nor is an “intellectual match” to him, which permits him to launch into the most aerial and disconnected speeches. Professor uses language in The Road in a very fragmented and incoherent manner. Professor captivates the reader’s attention more than any other character and holds a significant place in the play. His words and statements resonate so much that they end up shaping the structure of the play and, thereby, its obscurityn the scene in question, Professor’s response abruptly demarcates from the dialogue that he has been having with Samson and throws the reader off into a domain peculiar to Professor. He talks about having a bed among the dead, when the discussion is not about the dead, but about Kotonu. Professor’s answer is a reaction to Samson’s refusal to let Kotonu leave with Professor. A similar scenario is presented to the reader at the time of Professor’s death. His prophetic language can certainly be differentiated from the everyday and common vocabulary used by the other characters, especially the pidgin used by Samson. This brief presentation of Professor’s role and position in this text suggests that he is a highly visible protagonist, which may raise suspicions that his public display of interest in the divine— the Word—is that of the Pharisee, as Probyn, Ogunba and Phillips have suggested in their analysis of the characters. This line of inquiry is encouraged by the fact that Professor embezzles the church funds confided to him. It can also be put forth that the reasons behind his decision to become a church leader are monetary. And it is probably this interpretation of the financial scandal involving him that may have led the congregation to dismiss him. What undermines this vision of the character as a fake spiritual aspirant is the fact that he accepted to be trained in and to spread the teachings of Christianity, and it is usually after a long period of genuine dedication and exposure to Christian theology that the individual is trusted with the functions and responsibilities associated with the practice of priesthood. He does seem to have a genuine interest in discovering and unifying himself with the Word, but like most human beings, he is also entangled in the realities of the concrete material world. Because of this dilemma and mental distortion, Professor is involved in a life pattern that simultaneously kills and resurrects the god or goddess. In this respect, the points made by the critics mentioned earlier cannot be totally discarded. As was well put by Eldred Jones, Professor has “conflicting elements” in his character. He has his demons, but if this metaphysical approach to The Road is applied to the other characters, it becomes evident that Professor is not the only one who resurrects the god or goddess and kills him or her later, and this results from the fact that he is not the only one who accepts the idea of a transcendental being in the play. Unit:4 FICTION Chinua Achebe : Things Fall Apart Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. The novel was first published in the UK in 1962 by William Heinemann Ltd, and became the first work published in Heinemann's African Writers Series. The novel follows the life of Okonkwo, an Igbo ("Ibo" in the novel) man and local wrestling champion in the fictional Nigerian clan of Umuofia. The work is split into three parts, with the first describing his family, personal history, and the customs and society of the Igbo, and the second and third sections introducing the influence of European colonialism and Christian missionaries on Okonkwo, his family, and the wider Igbo community. Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work along with Arrow of God (1964). Achebe states that his two later novels A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), while not featuring Okonkwo's descendants, are spiritual successors to the previous novels in chronicling African history. Chinua Achebe (/ˈtʃɪnwɑː əˈtʃɛbeɪ/; born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe, 16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic.[1] His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his masterpiece,[2] is the most widely read book in modern African literature.[3] Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at Government College Umuahia and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English literature at University College (now the University of Ibadan).[4] He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for his novel Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers," in African literature. In 1975, his lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" featured a criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist;" it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid controversy. Summary Okonkwo is a wealthy and respected warrior of the Umuofia clan, a lower Nigerian tribe that is part of a consortium of nine connected villages. He is haunted by the actions of Unoka, his cowardly and spendthrift father, who died in disrepute, leaving many village debts unsettled. In response, Okonkwo became a clansman, warrior, farmer, and family provider extraordinaire. He has a twelve-year-old son named Nwoye whom he finds lazy; Okonkwo worries that Nwoye will end up a failure like Unoka.
In a settlement with a neighboring tribe, Umuofia wins a virgin and a fifteen-year-old boy. Okonkwo takes charge of the boy, Ikemefuna, and finds an ideal son in him. Nwoye likewise forms a strong attachment to the newcomer. Despite his fondness for Ikemefuna and despite the fact that the boy begins to call him “father,” Okonkwo does not let himself show any affection for him.
During the Week of Peace, Okonkwo accuses his youngest wife, Ojiugo, of negligence. He severely beats her, breaking the peace of the sacred week. He makes some sacrifices to show his repentance, but he has shocked his community irreparably.
Ikemefuna stays with Okonkwo’s family for three years. Nwoye looks up to him as an older brother and, much to Okonkwo’s pleasure, develops a more masculine attitude. One day, the locusts come to Umuofia—they will come every year for seven years before disappearing for another generation. The village excitedly collects them because they are good to eat when cooked.
Ogbuefi Ezeudu, a respected village elder, informs Okonkwo in private that the Oracle has said that Ikemefuna must be killed. He tells Okonkwo that because Ikemefuna calls him “father,” Okonkwo should not take part in the boy’s death. Okonkwo lies to Ikemefuna, telling him that they must return him to his home village. Nwoye bursts into tears.
As he walks with the men of Umuofia, Ikemefuna thinks about seeing his mother. After several hours of walking, some of Okonkwo’s clansmen attack the boy with machetes. Ikemefuna runs to Okonkwo for help. But Okonkwo, who doesn’t wish to look weak in front of his fellow tribesmen, cuts the boy down despite the Oracle’s admonishment. When Okonkwo returns home, Nwoye deduces that his friend is dead.
Okonkwo sinks into a depression, neither able to sleep nor eat. He visits his friend Obierika and begins to feel revived a bit. Okonkwo’s daughter Ezinma falls ill, but she recovers after Okonkwo gathers leaves for her medicine.
The death of Ogbuefi Ezeudu is announced to the surrounding villages by means of the ekwe, a musical instrument. Okonkwo feels guilty because the last time Ezeudu visited him was to warn him against taking part in Ikemefuna’s death. At Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s large and elaborate funeral, the men beat drums and fire their guns. Tragedy compounds upon itself when Okonkwo’s gun explodes and kills Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s sixteen-year-old son. Because killing a clansman is a crime against the earth goddess, Okonkwo must take his family into exile for seven years in order to atone. He gathers his most valuable belongings and takes his family to his mother’s natal village, Mbanta. The men from Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s quarter burn Okonkwo’s buildings and kill his animals to cleanse the village of his sin.
Okonkwo’s kinsmen, especially his uncle, Uchendu, receive him warmly. They help him build a new compound of huts and lend him yam seeds to start a farm. Although he is bitterly disappointed at his misfortune, Okonkwo reconciles himself to life in his motherland.
During the second year of Okonkwo’s exile, Obierika brings several bags of cowries (shells used as currency) that he has made by selling Okonkwo’s yams. Obierika plans to continue to do so until Okonkwo returns to the village. Obierika also brings the bad news that Abame, another village, has been destroyed by the white man.
Soon afterward, six missionaries travel to Mbanta. Through an interpreter named Mr. Kiaga, the missionaries’ leader, Mr. Brown, speaks to the villagers. He tells them that their gods are false and that worshipping more than one God is idolatrous. But the villagers do not understand how the Holy Trinity can be accepted as one God. Although his aim is to convert the residents of Umuofia to Christianity, Mr. Brown does not allow his followers to antagonize the clan.
Mr. Brown grows ill and is soon replaced by Reverend James Smith, an intolerant and strict man. The more zealous converts are relieved to be free of Mr. Brown’s policy of restraint. One such convert, Enoch, dares to unmask an egwugwu during the annual ceremony to honor the earth deity, an act equivalent to killing an ancestral spirit. The next day, the egwugwu burn Enoch’s compound and Reverend Smith’s church to the ground. The District Commissioner is upset by the burning of the church and requests that the leaders of Umuofia meet with him. Once they are gathered, however, the leaders are handcuffed and thrown in jail, where they suffer insults and physical abuse.
After the prisoners are released, the clansmen hold a meeting, during which five court messengers approach and order the clansmen to desist. Expecting his fellow clan members to join him in uprising, Okonkwo kills their leader with his machete. When the crowd allows the other messengers to escape, Okonkwo realizes that his clan is not willing to go to war.
When the District Commissioner arrives at Okonkwo’s compound, he finds that Okonkwo has hanged himself. Obierika and his friends lead the commissioner to the body. Obierika explains that suicide is a grave sin; thus, according to custom, none of Okonkwo’s clansmen may touch his body. The commissioner, who is writing a book about Africa, believes that the story of Okonkwo’s rebellion and death will make for an interesting paragraph or two. He has already chosen the book’s title: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
Unit:4 -FICTION Tony Morrison : The Bluest Eye Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford;[2] February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.[3] Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English.[4] In 1955, she earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. In the late 1960s, she became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City. In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed her own reputation as an author, and her perhaps most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a 1998 film. Her works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States.[5] In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Also that year, she was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. In 2020, Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.[6] The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. The novel takes place in Lorain, Ohio (Morrison's hometown), and tells the story of a young African- American girl named Pecola who grows up during the years following the Great Depression. Set in 1941, the story tells that due to her mannerisms and dark skin, she is consistently regarded as "ugly". As a result, she develops an inferiority complex, which fuels her desire for the blue eyes she equates with "whiteness". The point of view of the novel switches between various perspectives of Claudia MacTeer, the daughter of Pecola's foster parents, at different stages in her life. In addition, there is an omniscient third-person narrative which includes inset narratives in the first person. The book's controversial topics of racism, incest, and child molestation have led to numerous attempts to ban the novel from schools and libraries.[1] Morrison was an African-American novelist, a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner whose works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States.[2]
Book Summary
The events in The Bluest Eye are not presented chronologically; instead, they are linked by the voices and memories of two narrators. In the sections labeled with the name of a season, Claudia MacTeer's. retrospective narration as an adult contains her childhood memories about what happened to Pecola. The other narrator, the omniscient narrator, then braids her stories into Claudia's season sections, introducing influential characters and events that shape Pecola's life.
Claudia MacTeer is now a grown woman, telling us about certain events that happened during the fall of 1941. She was only a child then, but she remembers that no marigolds bloomed that fall, and she and her friends thought it was probably because their friend and playmate, Pecola, was having her father's baby. She tells us that Pecola's father, Cholly Breedlove, is now dead, the baby is dead, and the innocence of the young girls also died that fall. We then segue into a lengthy flashback, to Autumn 1940, a year before the fall when no marigolds bloomed. Claudia and her older sister, Frieda, have just started school. That autumn, the MacTeers accept Mr. Henry as a roomer because his rent money will help pay bills. The family soon has another roomer — Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl whom county officials place in the MacTeer home after Pecola's father burns the family house down.
Pecola and the MacTeer girls share childhood adventures, and what Claudia remembers in particular is the startling onset of Pecola's puberty when the eleven-year-old girl unexpectedly has her first menstrual period.
The second narrator offers us her memories about Pecola's family. She describes the house where the Breedloves lived (before Cholly burned it down), and she points out the antagonistic relationship between Pecola's parents. We see Pecola and her brother, Sammy, bracing themselves for the ordeal of listening to their mother quarreling violently with their drunken father, Cholly, as he tries to sleep off the effects of the previous night's whiskey.
Against a backdrop of grinding poverty, with her parents locked in an ugly cycle of hostility and violence, Pecola seeks hope in her prayers for beauty, which she feels will lead to her being loved. Each night Pecola fervently prays for blue eyes, sky-blue eyes, thinking that if she looked different — pretty — perhaps everything would be better. Maybe everything would be beautiful.
Claudia's narrative returns with Winter. She remembers the arrival of Maureen Peal, a new girl in school, whom Claudia calls "the disrupter." Despite Maureen's protruding dog-tooth and the fact that she was born with an extra finger on each hand (removed at birth), Maureen seems to embody everything perfect; she has long, beautiful hair, light skin, green eyes, and bright, clean, pretty clothes. She is enchanting and popular with both the black and white children.
Pecola is not popular. On the playground, Frieda rescues her from a vicious group of boys who are harassing her. Maureen moves quickly and stands beside Pecola, and the boys leave. Maureen then links arms with Pecola and buys her some ice cream. The world seems wonderful until Maureen begins to talk about Pecola's father's nakedness. Claudia and Frieda quarrel with her, and during the squabble, Claudia swings at Maureen but hits Pecola instead. Maureen runs across the street and screams back at the three girls, "I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly . . ." Deeply hurt, Pecola curls her shoulders forward in misery.
The omniscient narrator now describes Geraldine, her son Junior, and her much-loved blue- eyed black cat. Neglected by his aloof and status-conscious mother, Junior wickedly lures an unsuspecting Pecola into his house under the pretense of showing her some kittens. Once inside, Junior hurls his mother's big black cat in her face. Scratched and terrified, Pecola moves toward the door, but Junior blocks her way. She is momentarily distracted by the black cat rubbing against her. The blue eyes in the cat's black face mesmerize her.
Junior grabs the cat and begins swinging it in circles. Trying to save the cat, Pecola grabs Junior, who falls and releases the cat, letting it fly full force against the window. Geraldine suddenly arrives home, and Junior immediately blames the cat's death on Pecola. Claudia's narrative resumes with Spring, and she tells us about painful whippings and about her father beating Mr. Henry for touching Frieda's tiny breasts. The sisters go to visit Pecola, who now lives in a drab downstairs apartment; the top floor is home to three prostitutes — Marie ("Miss Maginot Line"), China, and Poland.
The omniscient narrator then tells us about Pauline Breedlove's early life, her marriage to Cholly, the births of Pecola and Sammy, and her job as a servant for a well-to-do white family.
Pauline's story is followed by a recounting of Cholly's traumatic childhood and adolescence. Abandoned by his mother and father, Cholly is raised by a beloved great aunt, Jimmy, who dies when Cholly is a teenager. During Cholly's first sexual experience, he and the girl, Darlene, are discovered by two white men, who mock and humiliate them. Afterward, the pain of humiliation, coupled with the fear that Darlene might be pregnant, prompt Cholly to leave town and head toward Macon, where he hopes to locate his father, Samson Fuller. He finds a belligerent wreck of a man who wants nothing to do with his son. Cholly eventually shakes off the crushing encounter. One day while he is in Kentucky, he meets Pauline Williams, marries her, and fathers two children, Sammy and Pecola.
Years later, on a Saturday afternoon in spring, Cholly staggers home. In a drunken, confused state of love and lust, he rapes eleven-year-old Pecola and leaves her dazed and motionless on the kitchen floor.
The omniscient narrator continues, introducing the character of Elihue Micah Whitcomb, a self-proclaimed psychic and faith healer known as Soaphead Church. He is visited by what he calls a pitifully unattractive black girl of about twelve or so, with a protruding pot belly, who asks him for blue eyes. He tricks her into poisoning a sickly old dog, proclaiming the dog's sudden death as a sign from God that her wish will be granted.
Claudia's narrative returns with Summer, and she tells us that she and Frieda learned from gossip that Pecola was pregnant by her father. She remembers the mix of emotions she felt for Pecola — shame, embarrassment, and finally sorrow.
Alone and pregnant, Pecola talks to her only companion — a hallucination. She can no longer go to school, so she wraps herself in a cloak of madness that comforts her into believing that everyone is jealous of her miraculous, new blue eyes.
In this final section, Claudia says that she remembers seeing Pecola after the baby was born prematurely and died. Pecola's brother, Sammy, left town, and Cholly died in a workhouse. Pauline is still doing housework for white folks, and she and Pecola live in a little brown house on the edge of town.
Unit:5 CRITICISM 1.Margaret Atwood : Ice Women v. Earth Mothers : the Stone Angel and The Absent Venus
2.Stuart Hall : Cultural Identity and Diaspora Stuart hall talks about the crucial role of the “Third Cinemas” in promoting the Afro- Caribbean cultural identities, the Diaspora hybridity and difference. Hall argues that the role of the “Third Cinemas” is not simply to reflect what is already there; rather, their crucial role is to produce representations which constantly constitute the third world’s peoples as new subjects against their representations in the Western dominant regimes.
Their vocation is to allow us to see and recognize the different parts and histories of ourselves. They should provide us with new positions from which to speak about ourselves. Stuart Hall provides an analysis of cultural identities and what they stand for, their workings and underlying complexities and practices. Hall argues that cultural identities are never fixed or complete in any sense. They are not accomplished, already-there entities which are represented or projected through the new cultural practices.
Rather, they are productions which cannot exist outside the work of representation. They are problematic, highly contested sites and processes. Identities are social and cultural formations and constructions essentially subject to the differences of time and place. Then, when we speak of anything, as subjects, we are essentially positioned in time and space and more importantly in a certain culture. These subject positions are what Hall calls “the positions of enunciation” (222). Hall talks about cultural identity from two different, but related, perspectives.
First, he discusses cultural identity as a unifying element or as the shared cultural practices that hold a certain group of people together and second, he argues that as well as there are similarities, there are also differences within cultural identities. In the following paragraphs, we will discuss these two sides of cultural identities. In the first sense, cultural identity is held to be the historical cultural practices that held to be common among a group of people; it is what differentiates them from other groups and held them as of one origin, one common destiny.
In this sense, cultural identity refers to those cultural codes which are held to be unchangeable, fixed true practices. This underlying “oneness” or “one true self” is the essence, Hall argues, of “Carribeaness”, of the black Diaspora. It is this identity which should be discovered by the black Diaspora and subsequently, should be excavated and projected through the representations of the “Third Cinemas”. Here we would add that this collective identity is not only to be represented by the “Third Cinemas” but also by The Third Literature and through The Third Academia.
It is this sense of cultural identity which plays a critical role in eliciting a lot of postcolonial struggles. The act of discovering such identity is at the same time an act of re-shaping and rehabilitating, of re-claiming “the true self”. It is an act which goes beyond “the misery of today” to recover and reconstruct what colonization have distorted. Imaginative rediscovery plays a crucial role in restoring such identity.
The emergence of counter discourses (like feminist discourse, anti-racist discourse, anti- colonial discourse and so on) which tries to highlight and bring to the forth the “hidden histories” are an outcome of the creative force of such sense of cultural identity. Hall gives the example of Armet Francis photographs about the peoples from the “Black Triangle” which is considered as a visual attempt, an act of imaginary reunification of blacks which have been dispersed and fragmented across the African Diaspora. Another universal unifying element of blacks is the Jazz music.
It is an attempt to restore the black agent to his home “Africa”, to relocate him, symbolically, within his true essence: “Africanness”. Such counter discourses are resources of resistance which problematizes the Western regimes of scholarly and cinematic representations of blacks. The second side of cultural identity is related to the discontinuities and differences, to the historical ruptures within cultural identities. Cultural identity is not just a matter of the past, a past which have to be restored, but it is also a matter of the future.
It is a “matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’” (225). In this sense cultural identities no longer signify an accomplished set of practices which is already there; they are subject to the “play” of history, power and culture. They are in constant transformation. Hall argues that it is this second sense of cultural identities which enable as to come to terms with “the traumatic character of the ‘colonial experience’. The Western representations of the black experiences and peoples are representations of the ‘play’ of power and knowledge.
Western categories of knowledge not only position us as ‘Other’ to the West but also makes as “experience ourselves as Others” (225). This colonial experience puts as in a dangerous position: it makes us ambivalent in our life, our needs, and our thought. This colonial experience had produced uprooted subjects, split between two words in an unidentified space.
This rootlessness, this lack of cultural identity which the colonial experience produces leads us to question the nature of cultural identity itself. In this sense it is never a fixed, shared entity. It is not one and for all” (226). It is not something which happens in the past but it is a process. What we told ourselves about our past is always constructed through “memory, fantasy, narrative and myth”. Cultural identities are not essences but are ‘positionings’; they are constructed sites from which we speak about ourselves. Hall states that black Caribbean identities are shaped through two operative vectors: the vector of the continuity which is related to the past heritage and the vector the discontinuity which is the result of slavery, transportation and migration.
In this sense, it is the Western world that unifies the blacks as much as it cuts them, at the same time, from direct access to their past. This colonial effect on the Caribbean positions the different regions of the Caribbean archipelago as both the same and different simultaneously. In relation to the West, we are positioned in the periphery, one space, one fate and one destiny; but in relation to each other, we have different cultural identities.
These variations within cultural identities cannot be simply cinematically presented in simple binary oppositions as “past/present” or “them/us”. Drawing on the concept of “differance” which the French philosopher Jacque Derrida had developed, Hall explains that cultural identities which, generally, we think of as eternal and unified are instead, merely a temporary stabilization and arbitrary closure of meaning historically and culturally specific. Cultural identities are subject to the infinite nature of the semiosis of meanings and the endless supplementarity within those meanings.
The complexities of the Caribbean cultural identities can be partly understood if we relate it to the three ‘presences’ over the islands: “the presence Africaine”, “the presence Europeenne” and the “presence Americain”, the terra incognita. The presence Africaine is the space of the repressed. It is inscribed in every aspect of the Caribbean everyday life and it is the secret, hidden code by which Western texts are re-read. This is the live Africa from which “the Third Cinemas” and other representations should derive their materials.
The discontinuity and ruptures which are caused by slavery and transformation makes us aware of our “blackness”. It causes as to return back to our past to discover our real essence which unites us despite our differences. This process returning back enables the emergence of a ‘new Africa’ grounded on and necessarily connected to the symbolic ‘old Africa’. Our journey to the old Africa is an imaginative journey, a symbolic journey to the far past to make something of the present day Africa.
The presence Europeenne, on the other hand, has positioned us in the rims of the centre and inscribes in us a sense of ambivalence manifested in our attitudes of and identification with the West, going backward and forward from moments of refusal to moments of recognition. Finally, the Americain or the “New World presence” constitutes the battleground where different cultures from different parts of the world grapples and collide with each other, what Mary Louse Pratt calls a “contact zone”.
It is the ‘empty’ space, the third space or the space of no one. It is the place where the processes of creolizations, transformations, assimilations, syncretisms and displacements occur: It stands for the endless ways in which Caribbean people have been destined to 'migrate'; it is the signifier of migration itself- of travelling, voyaging and return as fate, as destiny; of the Antillean as the prototype of the modern or postmodern New World nomad, continually moving between centre and periphery. 234) In this sense, the “New World presence”, the terra incognita, constitutes the very beginning of the Diaspora of the black presence, of diversity, hybridity, and difference. It is an open symbolic space which is constantly producing and re-producing, a space of heterogeneity of constant newness and uniqueness. The rich past of sameness and difference, of shared spiritual and cultural habits on the one hand and of memories of ruptures and discontinuities_ slavery, migration, transformation…_ on the other hand constitute “the reservoir of our cinematic [and other] narratives”. It is the real black Diaspora.