My Reminiscences
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), 1912
A boy in a vast Calcutta house, a school he hated, a first snowfall, a mother's death: Tagore's own account of how a poet's mind is made. Tagore recalls childhood rooms, schoolroom misery and first snow in a lyrical, unhurried voice, mixing wonder with quiet philosophical reflection.
Feels like nostalgia, wonder and tenderness. About memory, identity and family.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy memoirs that linger on memory, family houses and the making of a writer's mind. The prose is formal and sometimes archaic, and the narrative moves by reflection rather than event, so it can ask for patience.
Why read it
It offers a close look at how a poet's attention forms, and its reflections on emptiness and memory still feel fresh.
Pages from the book
Grief keeps returning you to the same place, to look for what isn't there.
The terrible darkness which was disclosed to me through this rent, continued to attract me night and day as time went on. I would ever and anon return to take my stand there and gaze upon it, wondering what there was left in place of what had gone. Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in; that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something, where we see nothing, are unceasing. The first snow of your life, and the world turns into something else.
Winter was then approaching. One evening as we were chatting round the fireside, the children came running to us with the exciting news that it had been snowing. We at once went out. It was bitingly cold, the sky filled with white moonlight, the earth covered with white snow. It was not the face of Nature familiar to me, but something quite different—like a dream. Everything near seemed to have receded far away, leaving the still white figure of an ascetic steeped in deep meditation. The sudden revelation, on the mere stepping outside a door, of such wonderful, such immense beauty had never before come upon me. Somewhere behind everything, a surprise was waiting — you only had to find it.
Looking back on childhood’s days the thing that recurs most often is the mystery which used to fill both life and world. Something undreamt of was lurking everywhere and the uppermost question every day was: when, Oh! when would we come across it? It was as if nature held something in her closed hands and was smilingly asking us: “What d’you think I have?” What was impossible for her to have was the thing we had no idea of. Rabindranath Tagore.He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913, for a book of poems he had translated himself, having been mostly taught at home.
Books that feel like this
More by Rabindranath Tagore
Gitanjali
Rabindranath Tagore, 1910
Short devotional songs that read like love letters to something unnamed. A way to spend an hour with longing, humility and joy, in English prose the poet shaped himself.
The gardener
Rabindranath Tagore, 1913
Fifty-odd small songs about love, parting, gardens and God, in the plain English prose the poet made himself, from the Bengali originals.
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Questions readers ask
- Is My Reminiscences for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy memoirs that linger on memory, family houses and the making of a writer's mind. The prose is formal and sometimes archaic, and the narrative moves by reflection rather than event, so it can ask for patience.
- What is My Reminiscences like?
- Tagore recalls childhood rooms, schoolroom misery and first snow in a lyrical, unhurried voice, mixing wonder with quiet philosophical reflection. Feels like nostalgia, wonder and tenderness. About memory, identity and family.
- What should I read after My Reminiscences?
- If you liked My Reminiscences, try The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris) and Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery).
A taste of the feed
The particular guilt of a well-behaved person in a police state.
I am a person who feels guilty for crimes I have not committed, or have not committed in years. The police search the train station for a serial rapist and I cover my face with a newspaper, wondering if maybe I did it in my sleep. The last thing I stole was an eight-track tape, but to this day I’m unable to enter a store without feeling like a shoplifter. It’s all the anxiety with none of the free stuff.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim · David Sedaris
What does the limitless geography of a child's mind look like?
Anne was curled up Turk-fashion on the hearthrug, gazing into that joyous glow where the sunshine of a hundred summers was being distilled from the maple cordwood. She had been reading, but her book had slipped to the floor, and now she was dreaming, with a smile on her parted lips. Glittering castles in Spain were shaping themselves out of the mists and rainbows of her lively fancy; adventures wonderful and enthralling were happening to her in cloudland—adventures that always turned out triumphantly and never involved her in scrapes like those of actual life.
Anne of Green Gables · L. M. Montgomery
The night sea does not look like water; it looks like a mind.
THE moon had not yet risen; but the vast of the night was all seething with stars, and bridged by a Milky Way of extraordinary brightness. There was no wind; but the sea, far as sight could reach, was running in ripples of fire,—a vision of infernal beauty. Only the ripplings were radiant (between them was blackness absolute);—and the luminosity was amazing. Most of the undulations were yellow like candle-flame; but there were crimson lampings also,—and azure, and orange, and emerald. And the sinuous flickering of all seemed, not a pulsing of many waters, but a laboring of many wills,—a fleeting conscious and monstrous,—a writhing and a swarming incalculable, as of dragon-life in some depth of Erebus.
Shadowings · Lafcadio Hearn
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