Swamiji’s Writing

Mostly he kept to his room, working.  As he had said during a lecture when living on the Bowery, “I am here always working at something, reading or writing – something, reading or writing – twenty-four hours.”  His mission of translating Srimad-Bhagavatam, of presenting the complete work in sixty volumes of four hundred pages each, could alone occupy all his days and nights.  He worked at it whenever possible, sitting at his portable typewriter or translating the Sanskrit into English.

He especially worked in the very early hours of the morning, when he would not be interrupted.  He would comb through the Sanskrit and Bengali commentaries of the great acaryas, following their explanations, selecting passages from them, adding his own knowledge and realization, and then laboriously weaving it all together and typing out his Bhaktivedanta purports.  He had no means or immediate plans for financing the publishing of further volumes, but he continued in the faith that somehow they would be published.