Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo

MARCH 1943

12th March, 1943

Disciple : T was such a nice person, – very good in behaviour etc.

Sri Aurobindo : 'That is so because you do not know what the person really is – you see only the outside.'

Disciple : But she was very disciplined.

Sri Aurobindo : "No – she was very nice so long as you did what she liked. But otherwise she was a person least fitted for Sadhana. The family has a touch of madness. She was hysterical and also there was dissatisfied sex. She looked very nice and people generally think it is a sign of great advance when a man stops speaking to persons or if he retires like N. B. and N. and even S. These are persons with small spiritual capacity. B. – tyes but B. had a great capacity. It was his inordinate ego that came in his way."

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Disciple : Mother is preparing 12 persons – apostles like Christ? – and then other 12 will be taken up etc.

Sri Aurobindo : "I don't know it, – unless you believe that I hold it as a State secret."

26th March, 1943

S. Iyengar's book on English poetry. "His Judgements are not always sound and his quotations though they seem striking at first they don't stand a second reading. So that they can't be taken as the best. For example, he speaks of Oscar Wilde – but he has not referred to the "Ballad of the Reading Goal" which is one of the best things written in English. Also his estimate of Blunden's descriptions of nature-photographic and true to Nature perhaps – but it is very doubtful if they will survive.

"Shakespeare you can go back to for the hundredth time. That is the test. Only T. S. Elliot will live – but that as a minor poet only. The moderners all have got diction but it has no value without Rhythm. They have no Rhythm."

No one now reads Ben Johnson because people are no longer interested in him.

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