Rabindranath Tagore: Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Camille Pissarro, La Charité, Signed C. Pissarro. and dated 1876 (lower right), Oil on canvas, Image Source: Sotheby’s

“For Pissarro, the rural countryside represented the very antithesis to modern urban life. Indeed, in paintings such as La Charité the artist celebrates, as Robert Herbert suggested, “ideals of health, honest labor and dignity which he set against the pollution and degraded labor of the city” (Robert Herbert, “City vs. Country: The Rural Image in French Painting from Millet to Gauguin” in Artforum, vol. 2, 1970, pp. 44-55).”
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Timely – and Timeless

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore, "Gitanjali 35" from Gitanjali (Song Offerings): A Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author from the Original Bengali, intro. by W. B. Yeats (London: MacMillan, 1913). Public domain.