5 TWO LETTERS TO AN AMERICAN FRIEND I've received two Sister Americas as against your receipt of one Mother India. This is a rather idiotically ingenious way of saying that you have written me two letters while I have sent you one copy of our periodical. But today I am in a somewhat ingeniously idiotic mood and this very frame of mind eggs me on to hair-split between being idiotically ingenious and being ingeniously idiotic! Perhaps I may best illustrate the former by the "famous" lines of Eliot: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.... Here the stress falls upon ingenuity and the idiot-e

17 I feel proud to have my photo so loved and honoured. Most photos that have an appeal are better than the actual persons in the sense that a good side of them is caught there whereas they themselves are changeable and subject to various moods. I am sure I also fall short of what my picture suggests to you, but I have always tried not to be a creature of moods. One of the first requisites of the Yogic life is a certain equableness of disposition - not to be on top of Mount Everest one moment and at the bottom of the Pacific the next or at least not swinging too much from gay sunshine to glum shadow. Of course it would be ideal if one were always in the light, bringing home to peopl

29 It is hardly surprising that in the wake of immersing yourself in the grand passages I had sent you from Sri Aurobindo's translations of the Rigveda's hymns to the God Varuna you should dream of a deluge. This deluge is nothing else than the presence of Varuna with his all-enveloping infinity which at once overwhelms and embraces us and washes away our small many-stained self from us and with wonderful waves of the ever-widening resonance of a Mantra merges us in a supreme mystery of our own being. Where time rolls inward to eternal shores. Naturally our normal consciousness is a little alarmed at such an enormous sweep of divine grace and we think of looking for a place