Two Lives

In this and other ways I tried to discover India, the India of the past and of the present, and I made my mood receptive to impres-sions and to the waves of thought and feeling that came to me from living beings as well as those who had long ceased to be. I tried to identify myself for a while with this unending procession, at the tail end of which I, too, was struggling along. And then I would separate myself and as from a hill-top, apart, look down at the valley below.
To what purpose was all this long journeying? To what end these unending processions? A feeling of tiredness and disillu-sion would sometimes invade my being, and then I would seek escape from it in cultivating a certain detachment. Slowly my mind had prepared itself for this, and I had ceased to attach much value to myself or to what happened to me. Or so I thought, and to some extent I succeeded, though not much, I fear, as there is too much of a volcano within me for real detachment. Unexpec-tedly all my defences are hurled away and all my detachment goes.
But even the partial success I achieved was very helpful and, in the midst of activity, I could separate myself from it and look at it as a thing apart. Sometimes, I would steal an hour or two, and forgetting my usual preoccupations, retire into that cloistered chamber of my mind and live, for a while, another life. And so, in a way, these two lives marched together, inseparably tied up with one another, and yet apart