Tagore, Tocqueville, and the Taste for the Infinite
Steering the sights of democracy outward and upward
What is the measure of society? Countless material metrics — GDP, DOW, debt, elections, employment, interest rates — track the dimensions of a healthy polity. But what marks the inner life?
I envy the longing of the Bengali poet. He offers neither angst nor easy assurance but sings a psalm of searching civility. It’s the bent of heart we rarely see in the commotion of modernity. The saying goes that if you take a pebble and throw it into a crowd in Bengal you will hit a poet. They’re everywhere. Poetry is a strong Bengali currency. The Indian tradition of Bhakti devotional poetry is a close cousin to a psalm. A prayer and a song and a sort of lovely lamentation. But the vast interior worlds of Bhakti grow ever outward.
The Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, presents the kind of longing we need today. He seeks divinity in summer rains, arid dusts, wet lily pads, and passing clouds, waiting and waiting … And in this unfinding he yet finds the unnamable mystery. A liberal-minded Hindu, Tagore turns our material languor into cosmic adventure:
I MUST LAUNCH out my boat… What emptiness do you gaze upon! Do you not feel a thrill passing through the air with the notes of the far away song floating from the other shore?
Underneath Western affluence lurks a different king of longing — the restless chase of the dream, the race to stand out, the push for more. A yearning of here and now. In his journey across America in the 1830s, French philosophical explorer Alexis de Tocqueville wanted to know what animated these new “democratic times.” With no common moral authoritative base, he discovered, the democratic personality sinks into itself and becomes the measure of its own notions of good. With one eye fixed on the progress of neighbors, democratic strivers learn how to be miserable in success. Much of what Tocqueville saw in America still stands today.
“It is in themselves or in those like themselves that they ordinarily seek the sources of truth” he wrote in Democracy in America. In this parade of competition, Tocqueville worried that democratic peoples would lose sight of distant horizons. The cramped crowds look in and around but are not accustomed to look up. The lights of the majority pose as the sun. Tangled under the tow of ever-revolving comparisons, we need a higher target to break out of the cycle, a solitude that swallows up the puddles and throws us into the ocean.
Gitanjali offers a model for stepping outside this dominant paradigm into an enchanting quest of the soul. He addresses deity by evoking the eternal renewal working within and without:
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
In one representation after another, Tagore immortalizes human longing for Brahman — the ultimate ground and good of existence. Amid this stream of reflections, one poem leaps out and pleads for the highest democratic ideals. It’s a wish and a hope and a truth at the same time:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Tocqueville observed that democracies have the tendency to get stuck in their own horizons. As an antidote, they always need to keep alive their “taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal.” He worried that Americans would loose themselves onto material pursuits and thus lose sight of the transcendent realm. And it matters little, he implied, which religious tradition becomes the conduit. Even the teaching of the transmigration of souls — a Hindu idea enmeshed in Tagore — is preferable to relentless careerism. Endlessness is a tonic to democracy.
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.
In our secular age, the meaning of the divine is something we deconstruct, qualify, wrestle, and resist. We fear religious space for its punishments and judgements. But Tagore reveals a God who reaches toward us as much as we reach toward it. The spiritual life of society is a game of love, a partnership, an artistic play between the individual and the Ultimate that recenters our desires.
Thou hast taken me as thy partner of all this wealth. In my heart is the endless play of thy delight. In my life thy will is ever taking shape… The great pageant of thee and me has overspread the sky. With the tune of thee and me all the air is vibrant, and all ages pass with the hiding and seeking of thee and me.
When the horizons of democratic struggle close in and obscure the greater skies beyond, this little volume of poetry from Rabindranath Tagore will launch you into seas unknown and shore up this precarious republic.
Thanks for this: As an antidote, they always need to keep alive their “taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal.” He worried that Americans would loose themselves onto material pursuits and thus lose sight of the transcendent realm. And it matters little, he implied, which religious tradition becomes the conduit. Even the teaching of the transmigration of souls — a Hindu idea enmeshed in Tagore — is preferable to relentless careerism. Endlessness is a tonic to democracy.
I am such a truster in everlasting lives of collaborating rememberers. The veil now and veils all the way back a forward—without selective entropy no intelligible value exists. The LDS infinite is so dynamic it needs to ‘slow down’ to be enjoyed. Here we celebrate the veil of incarnate particular forms all moving at different rates of change—allowing us to feel solid and loyal, to love—we are always transcending but would never ‘get it’ unless we lived veiled in entropic moments like this. We are food for worms now so we appreciate eternal banquets.
I love what you write about the transcendence that he finds in nature. You know I've been writing about McCarthy's The Road. After our conversation the other day, I've found new meaning in the novel's ending, hope in the hopeless post apocalyptic world, hope from the deep glens of nature.
Here a draft:
The father stands heroically but ultimately doomed in opposition to the overwhelming forces of entropy, seeking the while upright indications of transcendent meaning. After his death, the son is taken in by a good family, whose father stands waiting for the boy. The novel concludes with an evocative reference to a memory of fish that has appeared twice earlier in the novel: first with the father standing on a bridge looking down at a pool filled with gray foam where “once he’d watched trout swaying in the current” (25) and then when the father “stood watching the river. . . . He’d stood at such a river once and watched the flash of trout deep in a pool” (35). In the final paragraph, it is not the father standing and remembering; he is dead. The narrator tells readers that
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the montains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (241)
What do we make of this ending? This “thing” is gone, will not be made right again. Once: humans were still to come and the deep glens hummed of mystery. Might we read this paragraph as a “once” and future ending? Following the boy’s promising adoption by good people, “carriers of the fire,” as his father insisted, can we read this ending as one more challenge to entropy?
The earlier trout were described as swaying, as flashing. These trout are “standing in the amber current.” Wouldn’t it surprise us, disappoint us, were entropy were to have the final say in McCarthy's work? Were there nothing, noone to stand against the void?