Savitri – Eine Legende und ein Symbol. Sri Aurobindo

fount of action from a darkness wells;

      In ignorance and nescience are our roots.

      A growing register of calamities

      Is the past’s account, the future’s book of Fate:

      The centuries pile man’s follies and man’s crimes

      Upon the countless crowd of Nature’s ills;

      As if the world’s stone load was not enough,

      A crop of miseries obstinately is sown

      By his own hand in the furrows of the gods,

      The vast increasing tragic harvest reaped

      From old misdeeds buried by oblivious Time.

      He walks by his own choice into Hell’s trap;

      This mortal creature is his own worst foe.

      His science is an artificer of doom;

      He ransacks earth for means to harm his kind;

      He slays his happiness and others’ good.

      Nothing has he learned from Time and its history;

      Even as of old in the raw youth of Time,

      When Earth ignorant ran on the highways of Fate,

      Old forms of evil cling to the world’s soul:

      War making nought the sweet smiling calm of life,

      Battle and rapine, ruin and massacre

      Are still the fierce pastimes of man’s warring tribes;

      An idiot hour destroys what centuries made,

      His wanton rage or frenzied hate lays low

      The beauty and greatness by his genius wrought

      And the mighty output of a nation’s toil.

      All he has achieved he drags to the precipice.

      His grandeur he turns to an epic of doom and fall;

      His littleness crawls content through squalor and mud,

      He calls heaven’s retribution on his head

      And wallows in his self-made misery.

      A part author of the cosmic tragedy,

      His will conspires with death and time and fate.

      His brief appearance on the enigmaed earth

      Ever recurs but brings no high result

      To this wanderer through the aeon-rings of God

      That shut his life in their vast longevity.

      His soul’s wide search and ever returning hopes

      Pursue the useless orbit of their course

      In a vain repetition of lost toils

      Across a track of soon forgotten lives.

      All is an episode in a meaningless tale.

      Why is it all and wherefore are we here?

      If to some being of eternal bliss

      It is our spirit’s destiny to return

      Or some still impersonal height of endless calm,

      Since That we are and out of That we came,

      Whence rose the strange and sterile interlude

      Lasting in vain through interminable Time?

      Who willed to form or feign a universe

      In the cold and endless emptiness of Space?

      Or if these beings must be and their brief lives,

      What need had the soul of ignorance and tears?

      Whence rose the call for sorrow and for pain?

      Or all came helplessly without a cause?

      What power forced the immortal spirit to birth?

      The eternal witness once of eternity,

      A deathless sojourner mid transient scenes,

      He camps in life’s half-lit obscurity

      Amid the debris of his thoughts and dreams.

      Or who persuaded it to fall from bliss

      And forfeit its immortal privilege?

      Who laid on it the ceaseless will to live

      A wanderer in this beautiful, sorrowful world,

      And bear its load of joy and grief and love?

      Or if no being watches the works of Time,

      What hard impersonal Necessity

      Compels the vain toil of brief living things?

      A great Illusion then has built the stars.

      But where then is the soul’s security,

      Its poise in this circling of unreal suns?

      Or else it is a wanderer from its home

      Who strayed into a blind alley of Time and chance

      And finds no issue from a meaningless world.

      Or where begins and ends Illusion’s reign?

      Perhaps the soul we feel is only a dream,

      Eternal self a fiction sensed in trance.”

      Then after a silence Narad made reply:

      Tuning his lips to earthly sound he spoke,

      And something now of the deep sense of fate

      Weighted the fragile hints of mortal speech.

      His forehead shone with vision solemnised,

      Turned to a tablet of supernal thoughts

      As if characters of an unwritten tongue

      Had left in its breadth the inscriptions of the gods.

      Bare in that light Time toiled, his unseen works

      Detected; the broad-flung far-seeing schemes

      Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrolls

      Were mapped already in that world-wide look.

      “Was then the sun a dream because there is night?

      Hidden in the mortal’s heart the Eternal lives:

      He lives secret in the chamber of thy soul,

      A Light shines there nor pain nor grief can cross.

      A darkness stands between thyself and him,

      Thou canst not hear or feel the marvellous Guest,

      Thou canst not see the beatific sun.

      O queen, thy thought is a light of the Ignorance,

      Its brilliant curtain hides from thee God’s face.

      It illumes a world born from the Inconscience

      But hides the Immortal’s meaning in the world.

      Thy mind’s light hides from thee the Eternal’s thought,

      Thy heart’s hopes hide from thee the Eternal’s will,

      Earth’s joys shut from thee the Immortal’s bliss.

      Thence rose the need of a dark intruding god,

      The world’s dread teacher, the creator, pain.

      Where Ignorance is, there suffering too must come;

      Thy grief is a cry of darkness to the Light;

      Pain was the first-born of the