I turned the page, and found the second to be nearly as beautiful: Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill. Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.Īt the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. I remember that night in study hall, reading the opening verses with some astonishment, recognition, and a sense of being at long last in contact with the great traditions of the East:
I did not then know that this was the book, published in 1912 in the West, that had won for Tagore the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first non-Westerner to win any Nobel Prize. It was Gitanjali (Garland of Songs), just a little book of 103 poems by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a Bengali Hindu writer, written and rewritten in a time of loss, as he lamented the death of his wife and daughter and son. One evening in September 1973, I was sitting at the front desk of a classroom of some 30 boys, and to pass the time I had before me a book I had selected at haste from the Jesuit library shelf.
I was figuring how to teach, how to supervise teenagers in games and recreation and in study hall in the evening, and asking myself what I was doing so far from home. Xavier's School, a Jesuit boarding school for Hindu and Buddhist boys. I had just turned 22, and had just come several months before to Kathmandu, Nepal, to teach at St. Dianne Bergant and Michael Daley say, "can inspire, affirm, challenge, change, even disturb." Good books, as blog co-editors Congregation of St.
View the full series.Įditor's note: "Take and Read" is a weekly blog that features a different contributor's reflections on a specific book that changed their lives. This article appears in the Take and Read feature series.