Early Life
Alfred Sorensen was the son of peasant farmer near Arhus in Northern Denmark. His formal education ended after the family sold their farm when Sorensen was 14 years old. Sorensen then worked as a gardener on estates in France, Italy and finally England.
In the 1929, while working at Dartington Hall, near Totnes, Devon Sorensen met Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel Laureate poet. The two shared conversation and Sorensen introduced Tagore to gramophone recordings of Beethoven’s Late Quartets, the poet then invited him to his newly created university, Shantiniketan in Bengal to ‘teach silence’.
For three years in 1930-33, Sorensen visited India and came to see the country as his home. After initially staying at Shantiniketan, he travelled around India visiting places of interest. In 1933, he returned to the west to tie up loose ends there, before heading back to India where he would stay until the mid-1970s. When Sorensen returned to India he started wearing Indian clothing, a style of dress he would continue for the rest of his life.
Read more about this topic: Alfred Sorensen
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“Our whole life is startingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)