The Book of Life, pp. 188-189

Opening Remarks
Aswapati is now set to read the book of life. It is a mysterious script full of signs and gestures that are rapidly changing like costumes that disguise the actor.

A crabbed magician text
As one who spells illumined characters,
The key-book of a crabbed magician text,
He scanned her subtle tangled weird designs
And the screened difficult theorem of her clues,
Traced in the monstrous sands of desert Time
The thread beginnings of her titan works,
Watched her charade of action for some hint,
Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes,
And strove to capture in their burdened drift
The dance-fantasia of her sequences
Escaping into rhythmic mystery,
A glimmer of fugitive feet on fleeing soil.

The book of life is mysterious and its theorems difficult to decipher. Its processes are themselves a mystery like a magician’s book of formulas. The rhythms and flow of life, its many-sided currents and threads that are woven around creatures and interwoven with each other are not easy to decode. She seems like a dancer with rhythms that escape us. She is unwilling to give away her secret born of her fantasy of will and rapidly shifting shades and moods.

Labyrinth pattern
In the labyrinth pattern of her thoughts and hopes
And the byways of her intimate desires,
In the complex corners crowded with her dreams
And rounds crossed by an intrigue of irrelevant rounds,
A wanderer straying amid fugitive scenes,
He lost its signs and chased each failing guess.

Her criss-cross maze-like movements with side-lanes and blind ends and complex turns are all an intrigue. It is as if someone is wandering in a state of confusion amidst shifting scenes whose far ends one cannot fathom nor guess.

A luminous enigma
Ever he met key-words, ignorant of their key.
A sun that dazzled its own eye of sight,
A luminous enigma’s brilliant hood
Lit the dense purple barrier of thought’s sky:
A dim large trance showed to the night her stars.

The light upon her face is an enigma that she herself cannot understand. It is ass if someone knew the key words but does not know how to apply them. It is as if the secret is there but not the method of using it. The sun and the stars she has built in man’s inner and outer world illumine all things except themselves. Such is the mystery of life or so it seems that Aswapati must explore..

Chapters of metaphysical romance
As if sitting near an open window’s gap,
He read by lightning-flash on crowding flash
Chapters of her metaphysical romance
Of the soul’s search for lost Reality
And her fictions drawn from spirit’s authentic fact,
Her caprices and conceits and meanings locked,
Her rash unseizable freaks and mysteried turns.

As is glimpsing through an opening into the fields of life that is being illumined by intuitive lightning from Above, Aswapati begins to read chapter after chapter of the book of life, of her endless saga of romance where the soul is searching for her own lost Truth. Meanwhile life presents to the soul faces and fictions of a reality conjured from some authentic vision of Truth but presented here as a mysterious half-truth. The soul must navigate through these fictions and illusory reflections of Reality. It must run and search through life’s fields of strange circumstances that often seem to deceive and conceal their meaning behind her rash and incomprehensible twists and turns of fate.

Broideries of disguise
The magnificent wrappings of her secrecy
That fold her desirable body out of sight,
The strange significant forms woven on her robe,
Her meaningful outlines of the souls of things
He saw, her false transparencies of thought-hue,
Her rich brocades with imaged fancies sewn
And mutable masks and broideries of disguise.

Here her secret truth is disguised behind strange masks and magnificent draping that conceal her real truth. Aswapati saw through the disguise that life wears giving us an illusion of Truth which is hid deep within her bosom behind her seemingly transparent movements and images that she throws up in front.

Closing Remarks
Life as it stands today presents to us baffling faces that bewilder us and yet behind it all, there stands a deep Truth that is concealed to our superficial vision. This Aswapati must now search and discover.