Man is a pleasure loving
animal. He wants diversity of enjoyments. His intelligence has certainly
enabled to get a much greater variety of enjoyment that is open to animals.
Music, poetry and science, football and baseball and alcohol and cigarettes are
some from which people of different temperaments and mental make-up derives
pleasure. There are still others who undertake hazardous journeys on the
uncharted ocean. Some of foolishly expose themselves to frost-bite and other in
clemencies of weather simply to be called conquerors of snowy peaks but the
thrill-which these practical men get fails to stir their soul. Even if they
simply profess, it transports them to some ethereal pleasure; no sensible person
who experienced the vast range of vicarious pleasures would believe them. In
fact he who knows how to build castles in the air knows what the secret of
perennial is, and which never gives one a feeling of satiety or frustration.
Much has been said in
praise of the warriors who by their barbarian exploits conquered their
so-called invincible enemies. But is it not a fact that these conquerors could
never lead a life free from the fear of being over-run by some braver and craftier
warrior or soldier. And this imaginary fear drove them from one inhuman act to
another? Did not Arrangeable subject his father and brothers to most inhuman
treatment simply to become the unchallenged emperor of India? Also they had
cared to know how unconquerable is the person who handles sword in his
dreamland where no blood issued and where forces fall as easily a butterfly in
a young boy’s net. Had they been contended with such conquests they might have
not got a few pages in history read by bespectacled scholars, they would have,
at least, remained unchallengeable masters of the fore domains. After all what
does it matter to a person whether people talk well or bad of him after he is
dead then why expose us to the smoky hazardous battle-field? Is not our
unconquerable fort which is not to be defended by death dealing weapons better,
it is in this world that intrigues find little head way.
No doubt achievements
give us a sense of fulfilment and a feeling of joy. But this joy is seldom or
never in proportion to our efforts. Naturally all our plans and the pains taken
in executing them head to insignificant pleasure, Not only that, This pleasure
is not lasting. It is bound to result in frustration if success in one
achievement is not followed by another. A part from that we may think that we
have done something remarkable but others might not. This will prick the bubble
of our pride and pleasure; the appreciation is whole hearted it might be only
of section of people whose opinions we value the least, Then the fear of not
being up to the mark also dissipate the pleasure we are likely to get from
doing something concrete. And the period preceding our success is a period of
great tension. In fact what we do by building castles on the earth is not to please
over selves but to please others. We work as salves and not as masters of our
souls. If still some think that there is no pleasure in idle dreams let them
think so, It is a matter of opinion, and if we claim to be civilize we should
not grudge them the right to entertain worn ideas. Above all pleasure is
completely a personal affair. When it becomes a community affair, as—the--pleasure
from concrete achievement is, we may call it anything else, but to call it
pleasure would be misnomer.
Nevertheless they who
are earthy are contemptuous of day dreamers. The who ‘late and soon getting and
spending law waste their powers and little see in nature that is ours are prone
to have such feelings for those who make plans and entertain hopes that can
never be realized . But are the dreams of such dreams to which we owe much of color
and joy in the world. They make our drab world permeate with those who make
life worth living. They wipe tears off every eye. They are the angles who do
not fear to tread or even to rush, whatever the attitude of the down-to- It is
a fact that in all ages such drearier. Have been dubbed cranks. Nevertheless,
it is the cranks of one age who dream of a world different from the one in
which they lived that mankind have, though at a slow pace, become different
from what other species are. The discontents of such dreamers with the present
make them to visualize a world where mankind would enjoy the ‘sweetness and
light they unconsciously had been instruments.
Day dreamers have super-human
power of withdrawing themselves -from the tedium of boring routine. They by
virtue of sanguine optimism have the capacity to neutralize the blind darkness
of the realist. The hopes they entertain never meet with frustration, and they
with unheated zeal go ahead from one pleasure to another. This pleasure is
rather unknown to those who cannot abandon themselves completely. An egoist who
is ambitkotis to become supreme lord of a cherished domain cannot know this
pleasure. Only the meet enter this kingdom. Obviously of all sorts of material
gains which yelled nothing but disappointment, with a pipe in his mouth and a
vacant glance iii its eyes our dreamer is transported to that region where
hatred ignoble reclaims give rise to love, humanism, broad mindedness and
internationalism. And the picture of the world that emerges from such thinking
is a thrilling and colorful picture as e seen through a kaleidoscope by a boy.
The man thus engrossed
in his visions may appear to some like an ineffectual angle beating wings in
the luminous void.’ He may hold others in awe for his having been field on
‘Manna’ according to some whose wings have been clipped. But it is in such
moment that he becomes what Adam and Eve were before they tasted the forbidden
fruit. It is perhaps owing to this ennobling effect of day dreams that we lose
the capacity of dreaming while awake and we resort to somnolent drugs. Youths
petrified by the decadent affluent society which ensures security’ life takes
forbidden drug like LSD so that they might become to the confounding commotion
around them. The psychologist might attribute this mode of thinking of the
youths, it is a fact that we all crave for pure pleasure which endows us with
the capacity to forget the world of petty jealousies, inglorious competition
and foolish ambition which wreck Machetes. And it is in such moments that we
become too human- neither bundle of inhibitions, nor indiscreet devils.
A dream of every sane man who does
not long for extraneous pleasures and who does not build up his world of
pleasures on the wreckage of others, pleases. The pleasure thus got is
something to be proud of and to be cherished for despite all the denunciation
of the matter of fact people to whom two and two are four, neither three nor
five, and such persons have that happy sensibility which does not let them
‘look before and after and pine for what in naught.’. Nor do their ‘sweets
songs tell of saddest thought’. They see the charmed magic casements opening on
the foam of perilous seas, in fatty lands forlorn’ far away from the world.
Where men sit and hear each
other’s groan.
Where palsy shakes a few, sad
grey hairs.
Where youth grows pale, specter
him, and dies.
Where but to think is to be full
of sorrow
And leaden eyes despair.
Where Beauty cannot keep her
lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond
tomorrow.