I read a beautiful story recently about Satyajit Ray’s first meeting with Rabindranath Tagore.

Satyajit Ray is considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Akiro Kurosawa said, “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”

His most famous works are the three films known as The Apu Trilogy:

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali writer, poet, composer, painter, and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore took the money he won from the Nobel Prize and opened a school, Visva-Bharati University (often called Santiniketan for the town in which it was founded). Tagore hated rote learning. His goal with the school was more personalized, integrated learning.

Satyajit Ray attended Santiniketan for his graduate studies, but he first met Tagore, a friend of his late father’s, in 1940, when Ray was just seven years old.

By that time, Tagore was a loved and revered national figure, and the young Ray was quite excited about the meeting. He brought a small notebook with him, in which he hoped Tagore would write him a poem. Tagore took the notebook for a day, and upon returning it, said to Ray’s mother: “Let him keep this, and when he is older he will understand it.”

Here’s the poem he wrote:

Through many years,
At great expense,
Journeying through many countries,
I went to see high mountains,
I went to the oceans.

Only I had not seen at my very doorstep,
The dew drop glistening
On the ear of the corn.

Among the beautiful things about Ray’s films are the small details, such as the rain on a pond, a cat playing, a little girl hiding candy, and so on. I don’t know for sure that the poem influenced him in this way, but both Tagore’s poem and Ray’s films remind me to notice the beauty that’s right in front of me that I might otherwise miss.