India - the Mother

September 21, 1955

The country and all countries are flooded with worthless, badly written, badly thought literature which expresses vulgar things and stultifies you with vulgar things, thoroughly spoiling your taste through vulgar pictures. All that is because they have managed to produce things very cheaply, what they call editions "within everyone's reach." But the aim of those people isn't at all to educate people or to make them progress, far from it (on the contrary, they hope people won't progress, since if they did, they wouldn't buy their stuff anymore), their intention is to make money at the expense of those who read their literature. So the more it sells, the better it is. It may be awful, if it sells well it's very good. It's the same thing with art, the same thing with music, the same thing with theatre.... The whole earth is flooded with those things, to such a point that when someone has written a good book or a good play, there is no more place for him anywhere, because the whole place has been taken up by those things....

In America, when they speak of someone, they say, "Oh, he is worth a million dollars!" That's the highest compliment they may make.... Is he intelligent, is he stupid, is he ...? That does not matter in the least.... Naturally, America is a young nation, so it has the manners of a child, but a rather ill-mannered child. And the older countries have grown a bit too old, they can't react anymore; they wag their heads, wondering whether all this youth isn't right after all. It's all like that. The world is very sick.

Questions and Answers (1955): 21 September 1955