The Sun and The Rainbow

A Birthday Letter

TO J.A., AGE ONE ON NOVEMBER 17,1938

I am sure this is the first letter you have ever got. Of course you'll realise the fact many years later, but what I have to say now will perhaps not have grown old by then.

I need not wish you a happy birthday: such a wish would be superfluous, since you are so drenched in happiness every hour that your birthday can be no exception. I don't mean that you do not cry: you do that quite lustily, I hope, for it helps you to develop your lungs and throat-muscles. What I mean is that these howlings, even if due to temporary stomach-ache or some such calamity, are really lost in the general flood of joy which is your life-blood at present. You are a baby: your contact with the marvellous secret source of all being is still strong: no hard and dry crust has formed on your simplicity of soul.

It would be wrong to call you, as many students of childhood may do, just a little animal without any care — a tiny lump of smiling thoughtlessness. No doubt, in being free from "the pale cast of thought", you have an affinity with animal nature. Or, rather, the animal nature that is in all of us is at play in you without our expectations and forebodings, even as it is exempt from our ambitions and rancours. But this nature's ignorant spontaneity, expressing itself unper-vertedly, is mixed with the innocent grace of the divine spark in you. All that hinders the same spark in us is absent from your being. That is why you are not only happy but radiantly so and the happiness you radiate is the very stuff of your

Page 83

existence, needing no cause, depending on no circumstance. And I hope that, as you grow, you will not forget to grow in your soul side by side with cultivating your vital and mental powers. To help you do this, I should advise your parents to surround your childhood with two miracles which are within the reach of everybody.

They must keep you in the midst of flowers. Always there should be a sense of petals and delicate perfume near your bed. And when you are out of your bed they must move you about between green shadows and among gay blossoms. For flowers are the little smiles of paradise that break out of the sleep of Nature. They have at the same time a depth of gentle peace and the brave sparkle of colour. They never sit in sackcloth and ashes but neither are they carried away by their own pomp. Rich they are without being proud of their wealth, for theirs is a natural poise which is not either vain or over-humble: they do not refuse themselves to plucking fingers nor do they clamour to be plucked. Nothing can add to their perfection and nothing can take away a jot from it. This is the consciousness of the psyche, because its hold is on something infinite hidden behind things. May you, my dear little friend, always feel that your eyes are like flowers, that your face is like a flower, that every part of you, however earthly, bears roots in it of an ever-flowering delicacy of quiet and colourful fragrance.

The other miracle which must mingle with your growth is great music. I wish that every day some master-musician would tune your pulse. You will not know what is happening to you, but, as the strains of the world's wonders of sound float about you and gain soft entry into your being, you will become a citizen of a strange land which waits for all those who are not in love with the dust and heat of the common world. Slowly you will realise that though you may not see fairies dancing under the moon or angels bathed in an ecstasy of sun, you can listen to the melodious throb of dream-translucent wings and the golden laughter that drips

Page 84

from the motion of limbs unfettered by mortality. Words, articulate words, may mean nothing to you; but these sounds, delightfully linked together as if by magic, will fuse with the rhythms of your own living body and make harmonious all the instincts of your nature. The Greeks grew up in the midst of great sculpture and architecture: ours is not an age of builders of beauty, but we can raise around you palaces not made by chisel and hammer, spacious patterns of music, and we can set you amidst movements of gods and goddesses, a heavenly traffic heard for us and echoed to us by Chopin and Mozart and Cesar Franck, Bach and Beethoven and Wagner. Live, child, in these palaces, and find yourself, when you are no longer a child, one in spirit with those divinities. I can never wish you anything better on your first birthday.

Page 85