IT was good for me that my consciousness was never dulled to the surrounding world. That a cloud was a cloud, that a flower was a flower, was enough, because they spoke directly to me, and I could not be indifferent to them. I still remember the moment, one afternoon, when coming home from school I jumped from the carriage and suddenly saw in the sky, behind the upper terrace of our house, deep dark rain-clouds lavishing cool shadows on the atmosphere. The marvel of it, the generosity of its presence, gave me a joy which was freedom, the kind of freedom we feel in the love of a dear friend.
That which merely gives information can be explained in terms of measurement, but that which gives joy cannot be explained by the grouping of atoms and molecules. Somewhere in the arrangement of this world there seems to be a great concern with giving delight, showing that in addition to the meaning of matter and force there is a message conveyed through the magic touch of personality. This touch cannot be analyzed, it can only be felt.
The final meaning of the delight which we find in a rose can never be in the roundness of its petals, just as the final meaning of the joy of music cannot be in a phonograph record. Somehow we feel that through a rose the language of love reaches our heart. Do we not carry a rose to our beloved because it has already embodied a message which unlike our language of words cannot be analyzed? Through this gift we utilize a universal language of joy for our own purposes of expression.
Facts and power belong to the outer, not to the inner soul of things. Gladness is the one criterion of truth, and we know we have touched it by the music truth gives, by the joy it sends to the truth in us. It is not as either waves that we receive our light; the morning does not wait for a scientist to introduce it. In the same way, we touch the reality within us only when we receive love or goodness, not through the erudite discussion of ethical doctrines.
Rabindranath Tagore
