Reason and Spirit in Rabindranath Tagore's The Post Office

1187 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Summary of the postmaster pros written by rabindranath tagore

Reason is an integral part of human intelligence while a lively spirit is a core ingredient of human soul. Some people are dominated by reason while others let both reason and spirit direct them in the course of life. As far as the rest of the people are concerned, their spirit is the dominant factor directing them and taking them forward. The guiding force in a person’s life also makes a statement about the nature and characteristics of that person. In Rabindranath Tagore’s text The Post Office, how text operates beyond a literal level is clear from the text’s depiction of the detail that what opens the doors of reason that hold people in is the undying and free spirit and imagination of a person, which fly.
Those who are pure of heart may have a kind of spirit and imagination, which is ready to break the barriers not many; others are courageous enough to break, including the doors of reason. Amal is the one who is pure of heart and has a kind of spirit and imagination, which is ready to break the barriers, not many others are courageous enough to break, including the barriers of reason. This is evident from how he continuously expresses the desire to go out when everyone is cautioning him against it. At one point, Amal states, “Wish I were a squirrel! --it would be lovely. Uncle, why won't you let me go about?” (Tagore, 5). This demonstrates that he opens the door of reason with his spirit despite being constantly reminded of reason. In another example, Amal goes on to underline that that he doesn't want to be learned, that he would "rather go about and see everything that there is" (Tagore, 5). This a statement that even though others expect Amal to follow logic and be a learned man, he wishes to experience the world by se...

... middle of paper ...

...t only can they open the doors of reason, but they can also rise above mortality and other barriers associated with existence by reveling in small aspects and joys of life. When a person lets his or her spirit take control, it assists that person in living life to its fullest despite the time duration of his or her life. It also causes that person to say ‘no’ to restrictions and confinement. Amal’s life was short but he did not let the idea of death cloud his mind and enjoyed life while he could.

Works Cited
Tagore, Rabindranath. The Post Office. https://bbhosted.cuny.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-14325149-dt-content-rid-20920823_1/courses/JOHNJ_LIT_232_08_201309/The%20Post%20Office.pdf Works Cited
Tagore, Rabindranath. The Post Office.
https://bbhosted.cuny.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-14325149-dt-content-rid-20920823_1/courses/JOHNJ_LIT_232_08_201309/The%20Post%20Office.pdf

Show More
Related

  • Deviance In Society: Wideman's Our Time

    1337 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...face some trials that scar it, but not uproot it. The soul will remain strong and hopeful even after receiving a strike from fate. We need to find this kind of soul in ourselves and plant its seed in our offspring.

    Read More

  • Gilgamesh vs. Genesis

    1437 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this way the Jewish faith is able to truly bridge life and death in a way that the

    Read More

  • Fate In A Lesson Before Dying

    1152 Words  | 3 Pages

    When one lives in his body, he experiences fate. The spirit is forever free. When one live in the spirit, he experiences through and through freedom. “Our life as it is now is created by the results of

    Read More

  • Two Ways to Belong in America

    889 Words  | 2 Pages

    In her essay, Mukherjee uses several rhetorical devices such as figurative language and exemplification in order to lead the audience to believe her argument. She believes in assimilation of culture, but it should not be forced upon any one. Throughout the essay, she goes through a logical thought process that leads the audience to realize this argument and even feel guilty of forced conformity.

    Read More

  • The Literary Analysis Of Splintered Literacy And Writing In Sacred Spaces

    1138 Words  | 3 Pages

    The two essays, Splintered Literacies and Writing in Sacred Spaces, both revolve around the inherent “why” of storytelling. Each addresses a different facet, with the former delving into how the types and varieties of writing we experience affect our identities. Meanwhile, the latter explores the idea of thought concretization. Humanity developed writing as a tool to capture the otherwise intangible. Whether belief or abstract concept, the act of putting something in writing creates a concreteness, trapping the thought in a jar like a firefly. The thoughts and ideas we manifest onto the page or into the air give life to our knowledge, perpetuating its’ existence.

    Read More

  • The Identity Dilemma through Form and Content

    1644 Words  | 4 Pages

    Imagine comparing a person to a language. It would be so tricky and overwhelming: finding grammatical structures that would fit into a person’s personality, verb tenses related to life experiences etc. However, there are two main things which make a person and a language highly comparable: form and content. What are form and content? How are they related to each other? In his essay “Devoid of Content”, scholar Stanley Fish argues that when considering a language, we should leave content outside and just focus on form, because form eventually leads to content. David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, in “How to Write (the Perfect) Email”, point out the importance of form as it leads to a better content in writing emails. But is it really only about form? How many things do we know that only rely on form as a key to content? Although Fish, Shipley and Schwalbe put emphasis on form as a way to content, Gogol, the main character of Jumpha Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, shows that a person can never be “devoid of content” or a “perfect grammatical” structure because form and content are indeed equivalent and they reflect that person’s identity. Gogol actually swims across a medium of overlapping forms and contents which define his life and sense of belonging.

    Read More

  • Circles, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

    795 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...se many of their attachments to nature are dormant, and pose and obstacle to the individual to break past their shell. Nevertheless, the potential is always there, the real question is, can the person bring themselves to discard their inhibitions? In the sinister the difficulty is greater. However, in those who are righteous, walking into the unknown becomes an adventure, a righteous person will also be more readily able to accept their spiritually while attempting to capture the beauty of their surroundings. Like the never ending circles of the universe, there is never a limit to the amount of people who can accomplish this, because every person is capable of reason.

    Read More

  • Indian Culture in Punishment by Rabindranath Tagore

    572 Words  | 2 Pages

    In conclusion, it is interesting to observe the cultural significance this story has. Tagore wrote this story based on his cultural experience in India. Little pieces of the story point to the way of Indian life and values. Coming from another culture, it wasn't too hard to figure out what Indian customs were like after reading this book. So Tagore, in my opinion, did an excellent job of providing the reader with a basic understanding of how relationships between men and women existed during his time.

    Read More

  • The Perverse in the Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

    3364 Words  | 7 Pages

    So what is being undertaken here is a psychical study of man, an examination of the seasons of intellect, body and spirit, through which we all cycle. Also attempted is a portrayal of Poe's creative spirit. Though hyper-aware of his own tendency to perversity, what creative impetus must have been requisite for Edgar Poe to have penned poems and stories which so closely mirror the psychic patterns of his own mind!

    Read More

  • Philosophies Of Sri Mahatma Gandhi Essay

    1617 Words  | 4 Pages

    According to Mahatma Gandhi, the education at schools were pretentious and created an atmosphere of anxiety, superiority in living which clashed with his ideology of self-restraint eventually such an education can only handicap the spirit of service and public work. In his opinion liberty in learning was superior than literary

    Read More

  • Hinduism and Death

    1142 Words  | 3 Pages

    That being so, the pious Hindu approaches death as a mediation and a sadhana, as a spiritual opportunity. The physical body's impending demise compels him to practice detachment which yogis find easy but which is so difficult to achieve in the tumult of life. Yama's nearness brings an urgency to strive more than ever, to plunge deeper into consciousness in a renewed search for the Divine Self. No longer can he put it off. No mor...

    Read More

  • Comparing the Black Album and Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

    2541 Words  | 6 Pages

    The quest for identity in Indo-English writing has emerged as a recurrent theme, as it is in much of modern literature (Pathak preface). Indeed, often the individual's identity and his quest for it becomes so bound up in the national quest for identity, that the individual's search for his identity becomes allegorical of the national search (Pathak pr...

    Read More

  • Human Creativity and Spirit

    2912 Words  | 6 Pages

    The concept of spirit is meaningful. Our experience of value requires it. What are the sources of value? What gives them their authority? Reason, social conditioning, biological drives based on natural selection have all been proposed as sources. There is a great deal of truth in these proposals. However, reflection convinces us that none of these sources is alone sufficient, and even the three working together are not enough to account for all the values that motivate us. We shall support this conviction by argument in due course. Spirit is a hypothesis, as yet in early stages of definition, which provides a ground for otherwise unaccountable value phenomena.

    Read More

  • Gandhi's intent with Hind Swaraj

    1782 Words  | 4 Pages

    The measured dialogue between Reader and Editor serves as the framework through which Gandhi seeks to discredit accepted terms of civilization and denounce the English. These principle characters amply assist in the development o...

    Read More

  • A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

    1737 Words  | 4 Pages

    A Passage to India by E.M. Forster Upon a most rudimentary evaluation, A Passage to India is simply a story, a tale of two countries through which we follow a handful of central characters. As readers, we watch as these characters travel from England to India, into mosques and temples and through caves. We are given a window through which to view their interactions and whereabouts. It is undeniable that A Passage to India tells a story, however; to say that telling a story is all Forster does in A Passage to India seems to attenuate the accomplishment of his novel. The appeal of A Passage to India, the life of the novel, lies not in its story, but in the way Forster uses language to persuade readers to broaden their outlooks and to see that those who we may consider less intelligent or sophisticated than we, are, at heart, not so different, and the boundaries which we see as separating us are not as distinct as we would like to imagine. Forster uses his novel to suggest that much like the way any two sounds, no matter how different, brought before a hollow cave, will produce identical echoes, examined on their own, apart from the cultures which have come to define them, any two seemingly different people, no matter how superficially different they are, are at core, one and the same.

    Read More

More about Reason and Spirit in Rabindranath Tagore's The Post Office

Open Document