days of my leisure, it
was perhaps the mere whim to collect them which had come upon me. Or it
may have been only another phase of my emancipated self which had thrown
out its chest and decided to write just as it pleased; what I wrote not
being the object, it being sufficient unto itself that it was I who
wrote. These prose pieces were published later under the name of
_Vividha Prabandha_, Various Topics, but they expired with the first
edition and did not get a fresh lease of life in a second.

At this time, I think, I also began my first novel, _Bauthakuranir Hat_.

After we had stayed for a time by the river, my brother Jyotirindra took
a house in Calcutta, on Sudder Street near the Museum. I remained with
him. While I went on here with the novel and the _Evening Songs_, a
momentous revolution of some kind came about within me.

One day, late in the afternoon, I was pacing the terrace of our
Jorasanko house. The glow of the sunset combined with the wan twilight
in a way which seemed to give the approaching evening a specially
wonderful attractiveness for me. Even the walls of the adjoining house
seemed to grow beautiful. Is this uplifting of the cover of triviality
from the everyday world, I wondered, due to some magic in the evening
light? Never!

I could see at once that it was the effect of the evening which had come
within me; its shades had obliterated my _self_. While the self was
rampant during the glare of day, everything I perceived was mingled with
and hidden by it. Now, that the self was put into the background, I
could see the world in its own true aspect. And that aspect has nothing
of triviality in it, it is full of beauty and joy.

Since this experience I tried the effect of deliberately suppressing my
_self_ and viewing the world as a mere spectator, and was invariably
rewarded with a sense of special pleasure. I remember I tried also to
explain to a relative how to see the world in its true light, and the
incidental lightening of one's own sense of burden which follows such
vision; but, as I believe, with no success.

Then I gained a further insight which has lasted all my life.

The end of Sudder Street, and the trees on the Free School grounds
opposite, were visible from our Sudder Street house. One morning I
happened to be standing on the verandah looking that way. The sun was
just rising through the leafy tops of those trees. As I continued to
gaze, all of a sudden a covering seemed to fa