creativity

Continueing with Tagore's selected letters, the sensitive young poet describe to his niece about an artist's frustration and craving for recognition.
Cuttack,Feb.1892

I maintain that until we can achieve something we should live incognito.So long as we are fit only for condescension from others, how can we make a show of our true selves in front of them ? When we have established some position in the world, and had a share in shaping its course , then we can meet it with a frank face. Till then let us keep in the background, remain
silent, and do our own work.
Our countrymen hold the opposite view: Whatever work is backstage or private they deem insignificant. The more transient and vainglorious the task in hand, the better they like it. Ours is truly a God-forsaken land. To hold on to the strength of will to do is so difficult here. One gets no real assistance. There is no one for miles and miles around whose conversation might inject one with vitality. No one is thinking, feeling or working. Of genuine striving no one has experience; not a single mature human being is to be found. Everyone moves about like ghosts. They eat and drink, do their office work, sleep and smoke, and chatter nonsensically.When they touch upon emotion they grow sentimental, when they reason they are childish. One yearns for the company of a full-blooded, sturdy, and capable personality, instead of these insubstantial
creatures that flit about, unattached to the world.
And so the hours pass. Now it is late afternoon. It is not yet cold, and as I look out the sun pours
down.

from book: Selected Letters of Tagore

edited & translated by: Krishna Dutta/Andrew Robinson

Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) received early recognition as a Bengali poet of genius. His later translations into English of his celebrated Gitanjali brought him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and international fame. Though best known as a poet, Tagore was a remarkable and prolific short-story writer,novelist,essayist as well as an innovative painter and composer of songs.
The book Glimpses of Bengal consists of letters he wrote between 1886 and 1895,as a manager of his family's estates in eastern Bengal (now in Bangladesh) writing from his houseboat to his niece at home in Calcutta. A whole new world of sights and sounds and feelings had opened before him, and he responded with a characteristic blend of humour and sympathy, spontaneity and contemplativeness.
The letters are selected and translated by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson.

June 2nd,1892Shelidah
I hate all the demands of good manners. Nowadays I keep repeating that line: 'Much rather would I be an Arab Bedouin!* Oh for a healthy, strong, unfettered barbarity !
I want to quit this creeping senility of mind and body, constantly preoccupied with ancient quibbles over custom and convention, and feel the joy of a vigorous incautious life; to hold confident, carefree, generous ideas and aspirations- for better or for worse; to break free of this perpetual friction between custom and reason, reason and desire, desire and action. If I could escape utterly the bonds of this restricted life, I would storm the four quarters with wave upon wave of exitement, grab a sturdy horse and tear away on it to the very heights of ecstasy. But I am a Bengali, not a Bedouin ! I sit in my corner, moping and worrying and arguing. My mind is like a fish being fried - first this way up, now the other-blistered by the boiling oil on one side, and then on the other.
Enough of this. Since it is impracticable to be uncivilised, I'd better try to be thoroughly civil - why forment a quarrel between the two ?
* A line from Tagore's poem 'Wild Hopes'(Duranta Asha- 1888)