Albert Cook
THE SUNDERING
My hand presses open the glass door leading from the
interior warmth of Widener's basement into the windless, crystalline
cold of the Yard's open air. In late twilight the Yard lies deserted.
It is the last evening before the Christmas vacation, the snow sparkles
in white drifts and crunches underfoot, the air's purity expands to
the blue night. I am refreshed .at leaving the stuffy top floor of the
library. For even the last class before the vacation brought the usual
wrangle-Oh, as always, genteel !-with the flushing refugee philo–
logist and the wide-eyed missionary's son who soldiered in India. I
was in no mood to argue. Dorothy's letter, received this morning
and freshly read, bulged my inside coat pocket; sunk in melancholy, I
rankled at speaking. But as always there was an argument. Last
week it was the meaning of
bhava,
today whether Krishna
is
con–
sistent in identifying himself with
prakrti,
yet placing himself above
it.
"But that is if you want
prakrti
No.1 and
prakrti
No.2, it makes
it confusing semantically. I mean, the fellow himself appears not to
have been precise about the thing in his own mind," stammered the
philologist, drumming on the lexicon. He is none too happy anyway
with the
Bhagavadgita;
it delights him with none of the rich linguistic
tangle he finds in Bantu, Mongolian, or even the
Veda .
He seemed
almost famished the other day when he pounced on the crumb of an
interior samddhi,
vishvatomukham.
The missionary is worse, tilting
his seat back to the window and becoming Krishna in his own mind.
"But he
meant
to say that," with the enraptured smile of the lunatic
who believes himself a saint without willing the extenuated askesis,
the infinite inward doubt.
I can think of them only as arguing with each other, forever, on
