Between Genesis and the Apocalypse is the struggle and the striving and reaching out. Creation issuing out of God and Man’s fulfilment as his destiny are the subjects of the two Testaments. But eating of the forbidden fruit f knowledge is another story and it is for the poets to write about it. Virgil’s “tears in mortal things”, Keats’s “this nest of pain”, Shelley’s falling on the thorns of life and bleeding, Eliot’s “hollow men” or the “inoperancy of the world of the spirit”, even the Gita’s “this “transient and sorrowful world” are a poignancy that has to be borne on this difficult and dangerous pilgrim’s march. The frustrating endeavour and travail lie in between the two glorious ends; a tortuous hiatus separates birth and death. But there is another dimension to this labour and toil, even to death in the sequence of life, put aphoristically by Sri Aurobindo: “He stung Himself with bliss and called it pain.” To the woe of our heart He does not consent but tells us simply that its grief is just another name for joy. The horror of night about which we complain is but an opportunity to emerge into the day. Death is after all a passage towards life making the adventure worthwhile.

Nolini Kant Gupta believed that the entire history of mankind, seen in its essential psycho-spiritual sense, is a mighty effort of human life, almost a poetry of triumph, transcending itself and entering into the law of harmony, beauty, sweetness, truth, knowledge, even power, a wondrous movement born of and sustained by secret delight that is its own cause and its own effect, a great creative urge touching and pervading everything.

...   more »