The cow is the problem—whether the cow is in the meadow or not. And if she’s there, who is there to see and say the cow ‘is’, when you are not there. This is the sort of atmosphere in which the Bodhisattva asked himself questions, and thus made his way to the point from which there is no returning. The origin of things, the cause and cognizance of the cow . . .

Was she there or not? The cow. There or not. He strained his eyes into the night.

. . . [S]uppose the cow not to be there unless oneself was there to see her. A cowless world, then, stretched round him on every side. Yet he had only to peep into a field, and, click! it would at once become radiant with bovine life.

. . . Rickie rebuked his own grovelling soul, and turned his eyes away from the night, which had led him to such absurd conclusions.

(The Longest Journey)

Yet, if the objective law had a subjective self—what then? For there’s a magic absurdity about life; piety and laughter live so close to one another, as if love were but undeciphered intelligence. You couldn’t be wicked, for you would understand why the dowager maharani wants to poison you.

You just see the game being played. So with calculated spontaneity the maharaja leaves his state. He is not mad; he is wise and a king. He fasts for purity and fights against his enemies. He sends telegrams. ‘He was certainly a genius and possibly a saint, and he had to be a king’ (The Hill of Devi).

I write these lines in the rich springtime of Maryland, beside the state of Virginia, I—a single Indian Brahmin from the ghats of Mysore. There’s something of a Forster setting here, a metaphysic of stone and forest, the vivid cry of birds (and how Indian in their multicolour!), the leap of deer, the atmosphere of Sakuntala seen through, the passage to India. Lyric is this countryside, and covered with a vast humanity, as if the big feet of Abraham Lincoln had thrown up the earth and ploughed in a little bit of real England.

Here had lived an elder race to which we look back with disquietude. The country which we visit at weekends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the death, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields. All was not sadness. The sun was shining without. The thrush sang his two syllables on the budding guelder-rose. Some children were playing uproariously in heaps of golden straw. It was the presence of sadness at all that surprised Margaret, and ended by giving her a feeling of completeness. In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect—connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.

(Howards End)