The Winds of Wonder

Sunrise at Pondicherry — at the Sea by the Ashram

Sunrise at Pondicherry — at the Sea by the Ashram

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By

RY Deshpande

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2–3 minutes

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To find variety

Wilson—Then where do you find your variety?

Keshav—If you will compare the elements of those types in which the harmony is perfect, your ignorance will vanish like a mist. You will see at once that every planet develops indeed his planetary qualities, but varies from every other planet, and if Venus be the name and the star be feminine, is a dovelike white in complexion and yields an effulgence more tender than a girl’s blush, but if he is Mars, burns with the sanguine fire of battle and rolls like a bloodshot eye through space, and if he is Saturn, has seven moons in his starry seraglio, and is richly orange in complexion like vapour coloured by the sun’s pencil when he sets, and wears a sevenfold girdle of burning fire blue as a witch’s eye and green as Love’s parrot and red as the lips of Cleopatra and indeed of all manner of beautiful colours, and if he is Jupiter or any one of the planets, has the qualities of that planet and has not the qualities of another, but develops his own personality and has no regard for any model or the example of any other planet. [what a sentence! In one single breath!]

And if you drop your eyes from the sublimer astral spaces to the modest gauds of Earth our mother, you will see that every flower has indeed the qualities of its floral nature, but varies widely from her sister beauties, and if she is a lily, hides in her argent beaker a treasure of golden dust and her beauty is a young and innocent bride on her marriage-morning, but if she is a crocus, has a bell-like beauty and is absorbed in the intoxication of her own loveliness and wears now the gleaming robe of sunrise and now a dark and delicate purple, and now a soft and sorrowful pallor, but, if she is a rose, has the fragrance of a beautiful soul and the vivid colour of a gorgeous poem, yet conceals a sharp sting beneath the nestling luxury of her glorious petals, and if she is a hyacinth or honeysuckle or meadow-sweet, has the poisonous perfume of the meadow-sweet or the soul-subduing fragrance of the honeysuckle or the passionate cry of the hyacinth, and not the beautiful egoism of the crocus or the oriental splendour of the rose, but develops her own qualities without aspiring to the qualities of any and every flower. [and here is another!]

May we not then say that the dominant principle regulating the variety of individual types is the evolution of individual as distinct from generic virtues?

Wilson—That is the logical consequence.

https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/01/the-harmony-of-virtue

“… the evolution of individual as distinct from generic virtues” — that is the occult of the process entirely worked out by the individual soul in the universal operation of Nature. It is the soul-quality which gives sense to varying multiplicity. In the oneness there is the many-ness.

8 responses to “Sunrise at Pondicherry — at the Sea by the Ashram”

  1. RY Deshpande Avatar
    RY Deshpande

    Longest sentence in Milton’s Paradise Lost Book IX:

    Hast thou not wonderd, Adam, at my stay?

    Thee I have misst, and thought it long, depriv’d

    Thy presence, agonie of love till now

    Not felt, nor shall be twice, for never more

    Mean I to trie, what rash untri’d I sought,

    The pain of absence from thy sight.   

    But strange

    Hath bin the cause, and wonderful to heare:

    This Tree is not as we are told, a Tree

    Of danger tasted, nor to evil unknown

    Op’ning the way, but of Divine effect

    To open Eyes, and make them Gods who taste;

    And hath bin tasted such: the Serpent wise,

    Or not restraind as wee, or not obeying,

    Hath eat’n of the fruit, and is become,

    Not dead, as we are threatn’d, but thenceforth

    Endu’d with human voice and human sense,

    Reasoning to admiration, and with mee

    Perswasively hath so prevaild, that I

    Have also tasted, and have also found

    Th’ effects to correspond, opener mine Eyes,

    Dimm erst, dilated Spirits, ampler Heart,

    And growing up to Godhead; which for thee

    Chiefly I sought, without thee can despise.

    For bliss, as thou hast part, to me is bliss,

    Tedious, unshar’d with thee, and odious soon.

    Thou therefore also taste, that equal Lot

    May joyne us, equal joy, as equal Love;

    Least thou not tasting, different degree

    Disjoyne us, and I then too late renounce

    Deitie for thee, when Fate will not permit.

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  2. RY Deshpande Avatar
    RY Deshpande

    In Savitri:

    https://incarnateword.in/other-authors/kd-sethna-amal-kiran/on-sri-aurobindos-savitri-part-one-essays/the-longest-sentence-in-english-poetry

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    1. RY Deshpande Avatar
      RY Deshpande

      As when the mantra sinks in Yoga’s ear,

      Its message enters stirring the blind brain

      And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

      The hearer understands a form of words

      And, musing on the index thought it holds,

      He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

      But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

      Then, falling silent in himself to know

      He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

      The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:

      Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body’s self

      Are seized unalterably and he endures

      An ecstasy and an immortal change;

      He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,

      All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:

      Transmuted by the white spiritual ray

      He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,

      Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:

      An equal greatness in her life was sown. ||98.58||

      19 lines 143 words “God-face” as a single word.

      ===

      What is Sri Aurobindo’s poetic theory?

      To Sri Aurobindo the living word carries a great spiritual truth. Since words are the medium employed in poetry when he defines poetry as ‘the Mantra of The Real’. Poetry is the incarnation of great spiritual vision. The poet employs the word which holds the highest intensities of rhythm, style and thought. [From the Internet]

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      1. RY Deshpande Avatar
        RY Deshpande

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  3. RY Deshpande Avatar
    RY Deshpande

    There are 697 one-line sentences in Savitri.

    https://savitri.in/library/sri-aurobindo/oneline-sentences-savitri

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  4. RY Deshpande Avatar
    RY Deshpande

    The featured sunrise image id dated 24.7.’25, a Pythagorean triple.

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  5. RY Deshpande Avatar
    RY Deshpande

    Here is the longest sentence in Savitri, Book X Canto Four, 280 words 35 lines:

    Look on these forms that stay awhile and pass,
    These lives that long and strive, then are no more,
    These structures that have no abiding truth,
    The saviour creeds that cannot save themselves,
    But perish in the strangling hands of the years,
    Discarded from man’s thought, proved false by Time,
    Philosophies that strip all problems bare
    But nothing ever have solved since earth began,
    And sciences omnipotent in vain
    By which men learn of what the suns are made,
    Transform all forms to serve their outward needs,
    Ride through the sky and sail beneath the sea,
    But learn not what they are or why they came;
    These polities, architectures of man’s brain,
    That, bricked with evil and good, wall in man’s spirit
    And, fissured houses, palace at once and jail,
    Rot while they reign and crumble before they crash;
    These revolutions, demon or drunken god,
    Convulsing the wounded body of mankind
    Only to paint in new colours an old face;
    These wars, carnage triumphant, ruin gone mad,
    The work of centuries vanishing in an hour,
    The blood of the vanquished and the victor’s crown
    Which men to be born must pay for with their pain,
    The hero’s face divine on satyr’s limbs,
    The demon’s grandeur mixed with the demigod’s,
    The glory and the beasthood and the shame;
    Why is it all, the labour and the din,
    The transient joys, the timeless sea of tears,
    The longing and the hoping and the cry,
    The battle and the victory and the fall,
    The aimless journey that can never pause,
    The waking toil, the incoherent sleep,
    Song, shouts and weeping, wisdom and idle words,
    The laughter of men, the irony of the gods?

    35 lines 280 words

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  6. RY Deshpande Avatar
    RY Deshpande

    Thanks to NG here is the longest sentence with 321 words in The Life Divine:

    Whether they see dimly the material world as the body of the Divine, or life as a great pulsation of the breath of Divine Existence, or all things as thoughts of the cosmic Mind, or realise that there is a Spirit which is greater than these things, their subtler and yet more wonderful source and creator,—whether they find God only in the Inconscient or as the one Conscious in inconscient things or as an ineffable superconscious Existence to reach whom we must leave behind our terrestrial being and annul the mind, life and body, or, overcoming division, see that He is all these at once and accept fearlessly the large consequences of that vision,—whether they worship Him with universality as the cosmic Being or limit Him and themselves, like the Positivist, in humanity only or, on the contrary, carried away by the vision of the timeless and spaceless Immutable, reject Him in Nature and Cosmos,—whether they adore Him in various strange or beautiful or magnified forms of the human ego or for His perfect possession of the qualities to which man aspires, his Divinity revealed to them as a supreme Power, Love, Beauty, Truth, Righteousness, Wisdom,—whether they perceive Him as the Lord of Nature, Father and Creator, or as Nature herself and the universal Mother, pursue Him as the Lover and attracter of souls or serve Him as the hidden Master of all works, bow down before the one God or the manifold Deity, the one divine Man or the one Divine in all men or, more largely, discover the One whose presence enables us to become unified in consciousness or in works or in life with all beings, unified with all things in Time and Space, unified with Nature and her influences and even her inanimate forces,—the truth behind must ever be the same because all is the one Divine Infinite whom all are seeking. 321 words

    https://incarnateword.in/search?query=Whether+they+see+dimly+the+material+world&page=1&phrase=true

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