9 From whom I have taken many of these quotations.

10 ‘I have just gone through a frightening year: my Thought thought itself (in) and came to a Pure conception. All that, as a consequence, my being has suffered, during that long agony, cannot be related, but happily, I am perfectly dead, and the most impure region where my spirit can adventure is Eternity, my Spirit, this solitary inhabitant of his own Purity, which obscures no more the reflection of time. Unhappily I came to it through an horrible sensibility. But how much more I was, some months ago, in the fight with the wicked plumage, happily laid low; God. This is to let you know that I am now impersonal and not any more the Stéphane you have known—but an aptitude which the Spiritual Universe has to see itself and to develop, through that which was once I.’

17. Look, the Universe is Burning!

1 Poetic listening.

2 ‘Chance, one attribute of the elementary quantum phenomenon—is nature’s way to build definiteness. What about the other attribute, choice?’ John A. Wheeler, Physics and Austerity: Law Without Law.

3 The Rig Veda was composed, from linguistic evidence, about 1250–1500 BC and from internal facts about 3500 BC. However, no definite date can be fixed for its composition. This poem is X.90.

4 See p. 165, ‘The Ultimate Word’.

5 The cycle of life and death.

6 Zero as everybody knows is etymologically derived from the Sanskrit Sunya.

Appendix : Foreword to Kanthapura

1 After all, English is an Indo-European language. And remember, Indo-European languages have spread all over the world.

Notes

Part I: The Meaning of India

1.‘The Meaning of India’. Essay written, as an introduction, to a book on India for the Unesco, Paris. The book was never published, maybe because it was so metaphysical. But this introductory essay was published several times in India, especially in The First Literary Reader, edited by P. Lal and published by his, The Writers Workshop, Calcutta.

2.‘India—A Fable’. Published by Stephen Spender, in the earlier publications of Encounter, London. And subsequently, in my collection of short stories: The Policeman and the Rose (Oxford University Press).

3.‘My First Meeting with Pandit Jawaharlal’. The Legacy of Nehru, edited by K. Natwar Singh, The John Day Company, New York.

4.‘When Malraux Meets Jawaharlal Nehru’. The Nehru Memorial Volume, edited by H.Y. Sharada Prasad, New Delhi.

5.‘Mahatma Gandhi: Saint or Politician’. A lecture delivered on 10 May 1972, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, when I was a fellow there at the Center.

6.‘The Silence of Mahatma Gandhi’. Written specially for this collection of essays.

7.‘Wisdom and Power: A Marriage of Necessity’. Lecture given by me at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, 24 May 1972.

8.‘Forster, the Wise Man of England’. E.M. Forster: A Tribute, edited by K. Natwar Singh, Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. New York.

9.‘The Kumkum Mark’. Written for the Memorial Volume on Indira Gandhi, edited by G. Parthasarathy and H. Sharada Prasad, Vikas, New Delhi.