I sat wondering: Why is there always this deep shade of melancholy over the fields arid river banks, the sky and the sunshine of our country? And I came to the conclusion that it is because with us Nature is obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of the Universe! The contrast between the beautiful, broad, unalloyed peace of Naturecalm, passive, silent, unfathomable,and our own everyday worriespaltry, sorrow-laden, strife-tormented, puts me beside myself as I keep staring at the hazy, distant, blue line of trees which fringe the fields across the river. Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names are forgotten!
About This Quote
About Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore was a 19th-century bengali polymath. Rabindranath Thakur, also known by his pseudonym Bhanusimha was a Bengali polymath of the Bengal Renaissance period. In 1913, Tagore became the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any category, and also the first lyricist and non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Nature — Appreciation for the natural world and our place within it