The Winds of Wonder

2 responses to “About “Twixt” — An Email Exchange”

1. 

   RY Deshpande

   January 10, 2026

   Please see this reference:

   https://overmanfoundation.org/the-biggest-puzzle-in-the-text-of-savitri-by-amal-kiran-alias-k-d-sethna/#comment-204599

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2. 

   RY Deshpande

   January 11, 2026

   Marc Desplanque from Auroville writes in an email:

   I would go for the interpretation below:

   When Sri Aurobindo wrote “in”, he evidently meant that during the times when Aswapaty’s “building brain” had ceased from its activity and was in a state of calm, a condition of quietude, making an interval of “pause”, he had received “thoughts” from far-off unearthly regions. In other words, these supra-mundane thoughts were received when the usual mental constructions were in abeyance. With this meaning, the line was a straightforward statement. It had no “round-aboutness”, no “complexity in structure”. Similarly straightforward would have been a line if Sri Aurobindo had wished to say that the opposite was true—namely, that the activity of the building brain and not the recurrent pause in it rendered Aswapaty a recipient of superhuman influences. … 

   Now, with “twixt” instead of “in” to precede “pauses”, one has to take Sri Aurobindo as resorting to “round-aboutness” and “complexity in structure” in order to suggest the same situation by saying that everything happened in the space of time between one pause and another and that nothing happened at the time a pause was there. Sri Aurobindo is made to imply not just that the presence of the “heavenly visitors” was felt during intensely busy cerebral processes but also that it was felt only during them and never if there was any calm, quietude, “pause”.

   RYD: This is quite acceptable.The Aurobindonian thrust is on “activity” rather than on “quiet” which is there always even during an intense activity. This is what he had told to Lele when he met him last in Calcutta before his coming to Pondicherry.

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