LETTERS FROM ABROAD
New York, January 4, 1931.
When I finish reading your letters from Santiniketan I wake up from my lyric dream to find myself at the bottom of a prodigious pile of newspaper prose. My surroundings seem to me like the inside of a whale that has swallowed me.
The idea of freedom, which the people in this country have, is the imaginary freedom of a fly shut up in a glass casket whose walls are invisible. They are surrounded by an impregnable circle of unreality, to which they cling and believe that they are in solid possession of their sky. But I can assure you that you have the right to laugh at these buzzing creatures from your Santiniketan, with their absurd pride at having made their sky thickly substantial. This deludes them with a freedom that is of the eye, while immuring them in a confinement that is of the spirit.
I know low hard this confinement is, because I myself am in its grip. In a sense I am free; I can obtain this moment my passage to India; but the chain with which my ambition fetters me is stronger than anything made with iron.
My freedom is unreal, so long as I cherish slavery in my soul. This is a truism, like our idea of death; but opportunity comes when we discover it in our life, and then it discloses to us
