The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  Not mutual toleration but mutual knowledge is one answer to the supposed clash of civilisations, but only half or a third of an answer. Knowledge is always limited by doubt and uncertainty, and doubting has not yet been raised into a satisfying art. And knowledge, like food, tastes and looks different depending on who cooks it and how it is served and what meals the diner has eaten before. Knowledge is never raw. Cooking and eating knowledge is perhaps the most difficult of all the arts.

  I shall not ask you what your religion is. I prefer to ask instead: How do you put into practice whatever beliefs you have?

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  How can prejudices be overcome?

  SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME, humans have been proud of what distinguishes them from others, but also uncertain about how best to deal with the disagreements that bring havoc to their lives.

  ‘What is your religion?’

  ‘The religion of every sensible person.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘A sensible person never tells.’

  The Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683), who advocated this strategy of silence, was not afraid of rebelling against his king and beheading him, nor of colonising unexplored Carolina, nor of being a risk-taking politician, which ended in him being tried for high treason; but only on his death-bed did he have the courage to confess that he believed Christ was not God.

  It was dangerous to reveal one’s opinions when religious wars were devastating Europe, killing as much as half of the population in some areas, all in God’s name; and when the Catholic Inquisition was harassing about 150,000 ‘heretics’ – the terrorists of that time – and when opposing varieties of Christians imagined each other to be messengers of the devil, while preaching the need to love thy neighbour.

  Leaving individuals to decide and profess their own religion seemed to be the only way to avoid the continued persecution of disagreement. The American Constitution enshrined this idea, and other countries followed, but it has not proved to be a complete solution. Mass murder inspired not just by religion but by passions of many kinds has continued to plague the world. Toleration has not sufficed to remove mutual ignorance or contempt. Even when people of differing opinions are not physically attacked, they resent not being understood. Each epoch and each group has taboos that it is unwise to question or mention. Relief from persecution is only a beginning, because to be surrounded by indifference can be too much like solitary confinement.

  Replacing physical by verbal disagreement, substituting talking for fighting, was a great breakthrough. But the war of words between opposing parties that democracy has institutionalised perpetuates the military tradition of a victor defeating an enemy; it has not achieved the ideals that its Athenian inventors held most dear, that no-one should feel defeated, that past injuries should be forgotten and forgiven, that the victory of some over others was a sign of an inability to resolve conflict in a way that created harmony. Despite a proliferation of democratically approved laws, greed and arrogance still flourish and wars are still used to distract from domestic conflicts. Democracy has not advanced much beyond the sad conclusion of Solon (638–558 B.C.) that conflict was an unavoidable evil that enters every house, jumps over the highest walls, and that no door can stop it.

  At a more personal level, politeness has been developed to cushion the collisions of discordant minds. It added elegance to social relations and provided new avenues for the expression of kindness. But there has always been uncertainty as to how to combine it with sincerity, how to avoid it being just a game in which lies are exchanged, not always to deceive – only the naïve are duped – but rather to conceal the harshness of reality. Bismarck’s advice to be polite even when declaring war shows the limitations of politeness; it has not diminished admiration for aggressiveness, which continues to be rewarded in public and business life.

  Nevertheless, despite all these efforts to tame disagreement, it continues to grow as education spreads and critical faculties sharpen. But disagreement is not a disease. It is not just conflict; it is also the source of what distinguishes humans above all else. Humans think and reason. Disagreement forces us to clarify our thoughts, to put thoughts into words, and to discover new questions. Without disagreement, there would be no reflection, no search for truth, no enlivening conversation; humans would have nothing to dissuade them from constantly repeating the same platitudes, nothing to expand their tastes and their sense of wonder. Can at least some kinds of disagreement be more frequently a source of energy?

  It may be that personal differences cause more havoc than public disagreements. Public life breeds enemies and wars and quarrels about power and privilege, but private life is rampant with mistaken first impressions that abort friendship before it can start, petty disputes that leave a lingering poison in the heart, hurt pride which becomes a wound refusing to heal, as well as jealousies and anxieties that can be the cruellest kind of imprisonment. Should all this be treated as unavoidable?

  One of the oldest disagreements that have kept humans apart has been between East and West, the archetype of a couple seemingly unable to escape from mutual misinterpretation and mistrust. One of the most courageous attempts to span the divide was made by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Why, he asked, could there not be a ‘fusion of diverse races and religions and sciences’? All human beings, he said, have the divine in them, and only selfishness and narcissism prevented them from realising what they could do for each other. Their love of nature and literature, poetry and song could free them from petty obsessions. He wanted the East to expand the imagination of the West, and for the West to share its technological skills with the East. India was ideally suited to be the intermediary. ‘To establish a personal relationship between man and man has been India’s constant endeavour.’ Its people called everyone close to them father, brother, auntie, even if they were not related; they delighted in maintaining contact with distant relatives and childhood friends irrespective of wealth and caste. ‘These ties were prescribed not by the scriptures but by the heart . . . The moment we come into contact with a person, we strike up a relationship with him. So we do not slip into the habit of looking on man as a machine or a tool for the furtherance of some interest. There may be a bad as well as a good side to this, but at any rate, it has been the way of our country, more, it has been the way of the East.’ If only the East would assimilate what was best in the West, ‘what a full character will be formed from a synthesis between these two.’ Why did the world not listen to Tagore?

  When he travelled in the West, he discovered that those who dominated its thinking had deep reservations about his attitudes. For them, poetry, song and imagination were quite separate from real life. They dismissed his ideas as mysticism. Beatrice Webb wrote: ‘He has perfect manners and he is a person of great intellect, distinction and outstanding personal charm. He is beautiful to look at. He clothes himself exquisitely.’ But when he said ‘the intellect solves no problems’, or ‘all governments are evil’, she became indignant, resenting his criticisms of the West and also his resentment at her criticisms of Hindu tradition. Her conclusion was that ‘this all-embracing consciousness of his own supreme righteousness compared to men of action is due to the atmosphere of adulation in which the mystic genius lives and has his being.’ Bertrand Russell wrote after talking with him: ‘It was unmitigated rubbish – cut and dried conventional stuff about the river becoming one with the ocean . . . His mystic act did not attract me and I recall wishing he would be more direct. He had a soft rather elusive manner, which led me to feel that straightforward exchange or connection was something from which he would shy away. Naturally, his mystic views were by way of dicta and it was not possible to reason about them . . . His talk about the Infinite is vague nonsense.’ And Tagore, emerging from one of Russell’s Cambridge lectures, wrote: ‘I listened, and yet afterwards I do not remember a word of what the professor said, though my ears listened intently and apprec
iated the facility of his method. But it was all entirely irrelevant to the important matters of life and devoid of scientific discernments of demonstrably accessible facts.’ The Westerners who admired his poetry often saw what they were already familiar with, for example Christian humanism. Darwin’s daughter said, ‘I can now imagine a powerful and gentle Christ, which I never could before.’ Despite his fame, for many people he remained ‘not one of us’, and often nothing more emerged from a meeting with him than a reiteration of pre-existing convictions.

  In Germany, which in the nineteenth century had led the Western world in the scholarly study of Indian religion, his poems were at first read as illuminating Eastern faiths, rather than as a contribution to world literature; and for long it was religious, not literary, publishers, who chose to translate him. In the U.S.A., when he tried to fund-raise from Dorothy Whitney, heiress to one of America’s greatest fortunes, she said she was put off by ‘the woolliness of the poet’s ideas and the phoney business of his dress and play-acting’. She overcame her first impressions only after her husband went to work for him and opened her eyes to his extraordinary and immensely varied talents.

  Westerners placed him in the pigeon-hole of ‘Indian culture’, though he devoted his life to trying to change it. He said, ‘I love India but my India is an idea and not a geographical expression’, and he poured scorn on its corruption, greed and ‘barbarous inner discord’. When he spoke about the ‘world’s soul’, it was assumed that he was preaching an archaic religion, though he was an advocate of scientific knowledge and agricultural innovation, sent his son to study technology in Germany, and was even a pioneer of environmentalism, initiating the Festival of Tree Planting in 1928. To foreigners his appearance suggested a prophet from ancient times, but to Bengalis he was a man of the future, the apostle of their Renaissance, and hearing him in their own language, they were exhilarated by his ‘verbal zest’ and his fervent songs that set their emotions on fire.

  Few men have laid bare so openly, unashamedly and thoughtfully their emotions, their hopes and the full range of their mental processes as Tagore did, and few have done so through so many forms of expression, music (over two thousand songs), drama (more than thirty plays), opera, novels, short stories, essays, poetry, philosophy, history, autobiography, travelogues, and lectures all over the world. But self-expression – which has for long been worshipped as the supreme blessing of individual emancipation – does not automatically engender receptivity, the capacity to absorb what others say and understand what others mean; it concentrates attention on the assertion of individual identity.

  Tagore is probably unique in having tried to transcend human divisions by so many different routes. He appealed to reason, writing highly intelligent books for intelligent readers, who of course did not all agree with him. At the same time he appealed separately to the emotions, and first of all through poetry and music. If people wanted to understand him, he said, they should look not in his biography but in his songs. He believed that his greatest gift was for music, and that it was the best way to ‘communicate with the outside world’. He was inspired by the folk songs of the ‘Baul’ – wandering minstrels who for many centuries combined Sufi, Vaishnava, Tantric and Buddhist ideas to express the deepest yearnings of Hindus and Muslims alike, ignoring religious and political disputes. India and Bangladesh each adopted one of Tagore’s songs as their national anthem, and pop stars still set his lyrics to new tunes. ‘No poet or composer other than Tagore was able to produce so endlessly and effortlessly words and music at the same time, so spontaneously that he relied on associates to write them down quickly before he forgot them.’ In his songs, the world ceased to be ‘broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls’. The line ‘My buds are secretly fragrant with your scent’ encapsulates his idea of a whiff of inspiration sufficing to create a relationship. He sang about a future ‘Where the Mind is without Fear’; and in the face of rejection, he offered this encouragement: ‘If they answer Not to Thy Call, Walk alone.’ However, he gradually came to the conclusion that ‘it is nonsense that music is a universal language’; even his own compatriots, he lamented, did not fully understand his songs; and the West could not be expected to without a serious deepening of its knowledge of the whole of Indian music. He finally decided that neither his music nor his words could transmit his international message, and that pictorial art was a better medium for cross-cultural communication.

  Neither his admirers nor his detractors realised that in later middle life he discovered that he was colour-blind, the victim of a genetically caused confusion between red and green and a defective perception of red. He suddenly became aware that he saw people imperfectly; it was not only others who saw him imperfectly. At the age of sixty, painting became one of his principal occupations, through which he struggled ‘to blend my colours with everyone else’s colours’. In his poetry, he had never been able to describe the beauty of red flowers or of autumn foliage. Now, visiting the museums of the world, he studied every form of art – ranging from Egyptian monuments and Japanese woodcuts to English watercolours, but with particular sympathy for primitivism wherever he found it – ‘not to fall back on tradition but to enlarge it, not to be bound by one’s lineage but to increase one’s power of receptivity and to transform outside models so they became one’s own’ with a ‘rhythm that would make them dance’. But his painting did not change opinions. It became an experiment to make sense of what he could not see, a way of imposing new meanings on old objects. Instead of treating his ailment as a curse from which he must free himself, he preferred to regard it as symbolising the possibility of ‘touching the sacred’. The contrast between the seen and the unseen fascinated him. His conclusion was to ‘glorify the invisible’.

  Glorifying the invisible may define Tagore either as an idealist or as a spiritualist, which means rejecting the world as it is. So too does being a practical entrepreneur who wants to replace the present by the future, which Tagore also devoted enormous effort to doing. Having detested his schooling and never having bothered to go to university, he founded his own school and his own alternative to a university, which he named Visva-Bharati, evoking the goddess of learning and the arts, the equivalent of the Greek Muses. He wanted to introduce pupils to all the different cultures of India, and then all the cultures of Asia, and then those of the West; to offer them not just ‘fullness of knowledge’ but also ‘to establish a bond of love and friendship . . . and a sense of kinship with all mankind and nature’, enlivened by aesthetic appreciation of all their different arts. Classes were held in the open in the tradition of the forest schools of ancient India; but they also had elements of the most modern Western educational theories; there was no common syllabus but each individual was to have their own programme of study with an individual teacher. Memorising and moral instruction were replaced by the encouragement of ‘freshness of mind’; instead of relying just on books, he provided practical agricultural and social work with neighbouring villagers: ‘There is education in the mere effort of knowing a living person directly.’ Many of his students became famous world figures, like Indira Gandhi, who became prime minister, the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and the film-maker Satyajit Ray, who said his three years there were the most fruitful in his life, liberating him from his exclusive obsession with Western civilisation by ‘opening my eyes for the first time to the splendours of Indian and Far Eastern art’, making him ‘the combined product of East and West that I am’. However, Tagore came to believe that to attain his goal he would first have to bring all the regional and spiritual traditions of India together, and then get the whole of Asia to ‘know itself’: ‘the Mind of Asia is not yet fixed . . . Before Asia can cooperate with the culture of the West she must synthesise all the different cultures which she has.’

  There was profound disagreement between Tagore and the other towering figure in the struggle for Indian independence, Gandhi, though their relations were respectful and even friendly. Nehru sa
id no two people could be more different. It was not just the Brahmin confronting the Vaishya merchant caste, the reserved aristocrat in expensive robes against the man in the loin-cloth who could rouse massive crowds, Bengali against Gujarati, internationalist against nationalist, openness to modernity against withdrawal to the village. Tagore rejected Gandhi’s idea that Indians should go back to the spinning wheel, protesting that ‘the spinning wheel does not require anyone to think.’ When Gandhi, for whom time moved slowly, said that the people needed an idol, and had to go through nationalism in order to reach internationalism, in the same way that they needed to experience war in order to want peace, Tagore said he ‘could not bear to see the masses treated as children’, having their irrationality or credulity exploited, ‘which may have quick results in creating a superstructure, but sapping its foundations’. He lamented that his idealised vision of what India could be was far from the reality: ‘Divisiveness reigns supreme and innumerable petty barriers separate us from one another.’ He complained, ‘I have always been attacked by political groups, religious groups, literary groups, social groups.’ He concluded that ‘only when our different religious communities and castes have been schooled together can you hope to overcome the violent feelings which exist today.’ But education has not succeeded in making everyone wise and gentle; the quarrels of highly educated people are as relentless and often as futile as ever. And European and American students did not flock to his school, as he had hoped, with a desire to incorporate the full richness of Indian thinking into a grand universal synthesis.

  Tagore insisted that ‘the history of the growth of freedom is the history of the perfection of human relationships’, but in private he confessed that personally he could not reach that goal. ‘It would be difficult for you fully to realise what an immense burden of loneliness I carry about with me . . . I am by nature unsocial – human intimacy is almost unbearable to me. Unless I have a lot of space around me in all directions, I cannot unpack my mind, mentally stretch out my arms and legs . . . I have lost most of my friends because they asked me for themselves, and when I said I was not free to offer myself away, they thought I was proud. I have suffered from this over and over again, and therefore always feel nervous whenever a new gift of friendship comes my way.’ The solace he sought though ‘communion with nature’ never sufficed. He married a ten-year-old bride, without seeing her, and years later wrote to her: ‘If you and I could be comrades in all our work and in all our thoughts, it would be splendid, but we cannot attain all that we desire.’ ‘My connection with my family has turned into a shadow. If anyone belongs to my so-called family, that does not mean he is favourable to me.’ ‘I am a vagabond at heart . . . No-one will be able to put a chain on my feet.’ Fame only increased his loneliness. ‘My market price has risen high but my personal value has been obscured. This value I seek to realise with an aching desire which constantly pursues me. This can only be had from a woman’s love and I have been hoping for a long time that I do deserve it.’ But he kept his distance from the woman who offered him her love because he feared he would become her possession.