John St. John

7.32. 7.50- JOHN ST. JOHN How is it that I expect the reward at once? Surely I am presuming on my magical power, which is an active thing, and therefore my passivity is not perfect. Of course, when IT happens, it happens out of time and space—now or ten years hence it is all the same. All the same to IT; not all the same to me, O.M. So 0.M. (the dog I) persists irrationally in wanting IT, here and now. Surely, indeed, it is a lack of faith, a pandering to the time-illusion . . . and so forth. Yes, no doubt it is all magically wrong, even magically absurd; yet, though I see the snare,I deliberately walk into it. I suppose I shall be punished somehow . . . Good! there’s the excuse I wanted. Fear is failure: I must dare to do wrong. Goodl It has just occurred to me that this Waiting and Watching is the supreme Magical strain. Every slight sound or other impression shocks one tremendously. It is easy enough to shut out sounds and such when one is concentrating in active magic: I did all my early evocations in Chancery Lane. But now one is deliberately opening all the avenues of sense to admit Adonail One has destroyed one’s own Magic Circle. The whole of that great Building is thrown down. . . Therefore I am in a worse hole than] ever was before— and I‘ve onlyjust realised it. A footfallon the pavement is most acute agony—because it is not Adonai. My hearing, normally rather dull, is intensely sharpened; and I am thirty yards from the electric trams of the Boulevard Montparnasse at the busiest hour of the evening. . . . 83