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 and/or life:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
—Bible: New Testament St. Paul, in Romans, 6:23.