Monday, March 9, 2015

Why is the torrent in the workers paradise silent?

I believe you're referring to the short story "A Wrong Man in Worker's Paradise" by Rabindranath Tagore. In the story, a man who's lived his whole life pursuing no useful work and impulsively following his whims, dies and goes to heaven. There, he's mistakenly placed by an angel in a worker's paradise, the very last place you'd expect to find someone who never did an honest day's work in his life.
As the name suggests, there's no time for leisure in this particular paradise. There simply isn't a moment to spare for anything other than useful toil. Straight away, the new face in heaven realizes that he doesn't fit in. As he doesn't know what hard work entails, he spends his days idling about, getting in the way of everyone else as they hustle and bustle back and forth in their eagerness not to waste a single nanosecond.
It's not just the spirits in this paradise who are constantly at work; even the natural features are too. Back on earth, a raging torrent of water would make a mighty sound indeed. But not here; not in the worker's paradise. For here the torrents remain silent, and they would not waste their energy on something as useless as singing.

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