Reviews

Book Review #4

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville

Akash Kapur • Published: 2021

The book succeeds in being what it set out to be: a deeply personal account of experiencing Auroville during one of its darkest hours. It deserves credit for its compelling narrative. Beyond that, however, there is little to commend.

What is the most profound or original insight the author offers?

1. That revolutions are murky affairs—brutal, unjust, anarchic, destroying individuals and families.

Edmund Burke had already levelled that criticism against the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. Gorky and Orwell lamented the tragic course of the Russian Revolution in the twentieth. There is scarcely anything novel here.

2. That utopias are failed dreams.

The whole history of humanity has been a tragic succession of betrayed dreams—from Athens to Tibet, from the Vatican to the Kremlin.

3. That people often meet tragic ends by remaining faithful to their convictions.

Since the dawn of history, humanity has shown, in its noblest moments, that there are ideals worth more than life itself. That is why the stories of the gallows, the firing squad, and the torture chamber continue to inspire those who refuse to accept mere survival as the highest virtue of human existence.

None of these horrors is altered by the author's—or our own—sentimental goodwill and noble lamentations over the sorry state of the world. Such wailings have long since become redundant. They do not redeem our condition; they merely expose our impotence and, at times, our cowardice.

What is truly astonishing, however, is that one could read The Mother's Agenda,Savitri, and Notebooks of an Apocalypse; live in Auroville and be immersed in everything it has to offer; and yet display such total incomprehension of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's Yoga, and of Auroville's highest purpose.

Towards the end of the book, the author writes:

“They died for their beliefs,” people say of Diane and John. I suppose this is true. You could just as well say they died because of their beliefs.

No, my fellow seeker. It would be more accurate to say:

“They would have died one day, irrespective of their beliefs.”

This is not Eastern fatalism. It is the stark, raw, inviolable fact of human existence.

Only a few—those whom the book dismisses as fanatics, madmen, or tormented souls—have dared to challenge the human condition itself, choosing to wage, with bare hands, a lonely and seemingly impossible battle with Death, while the rest of the world remained content to quarrel over books and beliefs, lament injustices committed against them, or mourn the private tragedies of their own lives.

The book undoubtedly leaves the reader with sadness and anguish. Yet its most enduring impression is of an all-encompassing compassion for human smallness — this uncanny ability of humanity to reduce everything, everything, to its pygmy scale.