DAY BY DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 100, Issue 16712, 30 January 1926, Page 4

DAY BY DAY.

"To-day the Western holiday-makers

The West and Tho East.

who pay brief visits to Eastern countries, comfortably rushing across"" vast changes of environment, are

unceremoniously hurled upon differences that are too obviously on the surface," writes Radindranath Tagore in the Visva-Bharati Quarterly. "Here they suddenly miss all the products of progress to which they have become accustomed during the latest growth of their own civilisation, since the time of their grandparents. In their own countries their consciousness is kept stirred all the time by a sudden and rapid extension of power that arouses in their minds the exultation of unlimited possibility. When they come to a continent where Nature's great storehouse of wealth remains closed and where people's minds arc mostly preoccupied in following some timehonoured rules which, as they themselves believe, give perfection to social life, it is no wonder that the strongest impression which these Western travellers carry away with them is that of the greyness of a blank existence. They fail to see anything significant because they miss here the intense light in which they habitually l ! ve. They believe that, the obscurity is absolute; they only see the dusk, and very little of the world that lives UaaoL moves behind its screen^'.'...' -