मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

ecstatic beauty and joy. Hence the highest poetry fulfils itself by locking herself in deep excellences of truth. As I went on studying Vedanta Philosophy, I began to experience one feeling above everything else. And it was that the study of these books relaxed every fibre and nerve of my mind, and merged me completely in the contemplation of the Universal, to the extent that I completely turned away from fruitless action in the world of man. It destroyed my will to power and my power to act. "The highest attainment was inaction." This text resounded continuously in my brain. And words like 'the service of my country', 'altruism and humanity' faded into the back-ground as useless phantoms. Before this supreme goal, they appeared as transient and childish pastimes. A similar feeling of higher pessimism was breathed upon me when I read master-works on geology and astronomy. But for different reasons. These works describing as they did the earth and the starry heavens, brought home to me infinity of time and space, and, correspondingly puniness of man and the briefness of his life on this tiny globe. Why then struggle, why work and strive, why not live like lotus-eaters? That is what I felt. For all this was to end and to be lost in the depth of space and time. The study of Vedanta did not fill the heart of man with this kind of cynicism and despair. It did commend inaction; but in order to reveal to us the deeper joy and the higher realisation of our being, it exhorted man to cast off spurious dolls, but to endow him with something higher, deeper and more abiding than the fleeting pleasures of this world. In Vedanta the abandonment of action was in itself supreme self-realisation and supreme bliss. Not so the mood of despair and utter futility brought on by the study of geology and astronomy. In Vedanta, man is the master and the maker of his being, the spark of the divine, the emanation from the fount of life. To Science, man is the creature of nature, and subject to her mutations, and heading for the final dissolution of the universe into the vast emptiness of space and time. When I used to be lost in the reading of the Yoga Vashistha, the coil of rope I was weaving dropped automatically from my hands; and, for hours on end I lost the sense of possessing the body and the senses associated with that body. My foot would not move and my hand was at a stand-still. I felt the deeper yearning to surrender it all. All propaganda, all work seemed such a worthless task, a sheer waste of life. At last the mind and the matter asserted their sway over the body and swung it back to work again. On the other hand, when I read history and the other sciences, the will to power asserted itself with tremendous impact. When I read about revolutionary upheavals in the East and West, tottering thrones and empires to their fall, the news went to my brain like heady wine, and I felt that I should forthwith break the bars of my prison-door and escape, in order to hold up the flag of independent India, and plant it on the Himalayas. I felt I must rush into the fray, be in the thick of the battle, fight and win, or lose and be in the dust. These conflicts were all on the battle-field of my mind, and when I recovered from them, I used often to laugh at myself. What a plaything I was to be so tossed between these emotions—But! This is not the occasion for a synthesis of these questionings, imaginings and feelings. Hence, I mark the end of these musings with a 'Yet', and hasten on with the main narrative.