Awakenings of Love

By Michael Nagler

THE FOURTH LINE in the fourth scene of the fourth act of the great Sanskrit drama Shakuntala, by India’s greatest poet, Kalidasa, is uttered by the sage Kanva as he gives away his adopted daughter to the king Dushyanta who has fallen in love with her.  The line goes (this from memory as I don’t have the text in front of me): “If I, an illumined sage, can feel such grief at giving away a daughter, what must be the state of an ordinary father at such a time?”

Now, please don’t laugh.  That line came to me this morning as my friend Stephanie and I dropped off her kitten, Tessa at North Bay Animal Services to be spayed.  And I wept! I could not suppress a sob 𑁋 and neither could Stephanie.  And I don’t feel silly.  I’ve been thinking all morning about the meaning of my love for the kitten, Tessa.

I am not, after all, a grand person whose life is played out on a public stage; I’m not a sage and Tessa is not my daughter.  And yet, I feel that this love for the little thing is somehow just as real.  It is love, after all, and on one level it doesn’t matter whose love for what or whom; it is some fraction of that Love which, the Greek and Indian philosophers have told us, is nothing but a manifestation of the underlying universe. I’m not trying to make a big deal of myself or my emotions; on the contrary, I’m trying to help us appreciate, as I happened to do this one morning, how the profound forces of the universe play out unceasingly in the seemingly insignificant moments of our lives.  Wasn’t it Blake who saw “infinity in a moment and in a grain of sand?”