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Page 1 of 91929 · PDF PAGE 571
…er was "Kieh" meaning "Regulations". In the first three months I am described as unable to organize the affairs of the Order. But in the last three, a sudden change takes place. A way is found of establishing the proper system. Now, until the winter solstice the chaos grew more confused than ever. A few days later a man suddenly came forward precisely fitted to undertake the organization required. I say suddenly, for he had steadfastly resisted the Secret Chiefs for years. His soul was torn by an earthquake and he broke with his past ruthlessly…
1929 · PDF PAGE 370
… by playing fives, billiards, etc. till nearly six this morning) to make a final search for the Elemental Tablets. And lo! when I had at last abandoned the search, I cast mine eyes upon a hole in the loft where were ski, etc., and there, O Holy, Holy, Holy! were not only all that I sought, but the manuscript of Liber Legis! The ground was completely cut away from under my feet. I remained for two whole days meditating on the situation --- in performing, in fact, a sort of supplementary Sammasati to that of 1905. Having the knack of it, I reache…
1929 · PDF PAGE 569
… re-establishing the Order in London, the old Lodge having suspended its labours in consequence of the ridiculous raid described in "the Last Straw". For greater convenience, it was decided that the Ape and I should rent from him the top floor of his house, which we did on my return from the Continent. But now a new ordeal was prepared for me. Despite her quality, the Ape of Thoth began to show the effects of her long strain, anxiety and suffering. I called in a doctor who suspected the beginnings of phthisis, complicated with nervous weakness …
1929 · PDF PAGE 421
…ot: Come, save me, save Thy Maiden! Strike each barbed dart Home to the grave convent and cloister of my heart. 9. After the fifth foot: Last, to the lords who by their attitude applaud This day of burial to faction, feud and fraud. 10. After the second and fourth feet, but each line rimed within itself: Of for the blind kiss of the wind, the desert air Thrilling the blue and shrilling through my soul's despair. ("Thrilling" and "shrilling" are here thrown in without extra charge. This device frequently recurs.) There may be one or two other co…
1929 · PDF PAGE 28
28 Mysterious hints were given; and at last a boy named Gibson told me what action to make, but he did not tell me to what object to apply the process. It seems extraordinary that nature should have afforded me no indication. I nowise connected the organ of reproduction with any voluntary act. I made conjectures dictated by purely intellectual considerations, and carried out experiments based on their results; but they were absolutely ill-directed. I never guessed what organ was in question. The discovery was delayed for years. My revolt must h…
1929 · PDF PAGE 542
…gether an impudent inanity if it shows how every adventure may serve to bring about some achievement of eternal importance. {855} 88 The last lap! I sweep into the straight. The last jump has been cleared. Nothing now between me and the winning post. I made a rapid summary of my situation. The bronchitis and asthma, which were the symptoms of the emphyzema exacted by the God of the Mountains as the sacrifice due from whoever would approach his altars, had become a regular feature of winter. My obvious course was to dodge it by migrating to Nort…
1929 · PDF PAGE 25
…sed. This punishment, which I believe criminal authorities would consider severe on a poisoner, went on for a term and a half. I was, at last, threatened with expulsion for my refusal to "confess", and so dreadful a picture of the horrors of expulsion did they paint me --- the guilty wretch, shunned by his fellows, slinks on through life to a dishonoured grave, etc. --- that I actually chose to endure my tortures and to thank my oppressor. Physically, I broke down. The strain and the misery affected my kidneys; and I had to leave school altoget…
1929 · PDF PAGE 226
…lways got away. Nothing seemed to cripple him, though one would have thought that he must have been more hole than bull by this time. At last he turned at a small clearing. As I came out from the thick jungle, I saw him not ten yards away. He lowered his head to charge. My bullet struck him again in the Ajna Cakkra, if a bull has such a thing; anyway, in {377} 1. At that time headquarters of Evangelicalism. the middle of the forehead just above the eyes. This time he dropped. It was my nineteenth bullet and only the first had failed to strike h…
1929 · PDF PAGE 79
…and my heart was lonely, hungry and embittered as only a poet's heart can understand. This determination developed gradually during that last May term. He fought most desperately against my increasing preoccupation with the aspiration in which he recognized the executioner of our friendship. Shortly after I went down, we had a last interview. I had gone down to the Bear at Maidenhead, on the quiet, to write "Jezebel". I only told one person --- in strict confidence --- where I was going; but Pollitt found out that person and forced him to tell …
1929 · PDF PAGE 33
…ct that they were far more {76} exclusive than any other religious body in Europe) was composed of a few of the old guard, my father the last of them all, and the meanest crew of canaille that ever wriggled. With my father's death the small schisms which had hitherto lopped off a few members every year or two were altogether surpassed by the great Raven heresy, which split the body into two nearly equal halves and extinguished the last sparks of its importance.
1929 · PDF PAGE 228
…lung to the frame desperately, still squealing. She refused utterly to respond to the accents of the human voice. When I got her down at last, she clawed and scratched and bit and spat and squealed, exactly as the dying bat had done to her. It was quite a long time before I got her back to her human consciousness. It was the finest case of obsession that I had ever had the good fortune to observe. Of course it is easy to explain that in her hypersensitive condition the incident of the day had reproduced itself in a dream. She had identified her…
1929 · PDF PAGE 468
…on is the essay. I showed the manuscript to poor Tommy Earp who might have been a poet if he had not been a plutocrat. He said that "The Last Straw" was the limit in its line and my judgment jumps with his. Any considered statement, any documented plea, would lack the note of intensity and genuineness which my careless spontaneity and impulsive indignation taught me. I shall therefore print the scorpion as I wrote it. Its devil must excuse its indecorum. The savage contempt of Swift composed an indictment of human nature far exceeding the utmos…
1929 · PDF PAGE 195
…. I left Baramula on September 21st, reached Pindi on the twenty-fourth, and after a day or two in Delhi and Ajmer reached Bombay on the last day of the month. I had meant to investigate Jaipur and the abandoned city which was deserted in the heyday of its splendour at an hour's notice on the advice of an astrologer. (He prophesied, observe, that it would become like "the courts where Jamshyd glorified and drank deep", and so it did!) But my power to feel had been definitely dulled by the expedition. Hardship and sickness had temporarily exhaus…
1929 · PDF PAGE 464
…Any serious setback might cause disaster in a dozen different directions. They talk of the melting pot. The metaphor is not bad. For the last sixty years they have pitched into it indiscriminately everything that came along. They protest passionately that the product must be that perfect gold, the "one hundred per cent. American", which may be defined as the wish phantasms of a Sunday School superintendent, a romantic flapper, an unscrupulous usurer, and a maudlin medium, worked up into a single delirious nightmare. More likely the interaction …
1929 · PDF PAGE 3
…hantasm of its optical value. By the spectroscope, a hint of its composition. By the telescope, and our mathematics, its course. In this last case we may legitimately argue from the known to the unknown: by our measure of the brief visible curve, we can calculate whence it has come and whither it will go. Experience justifies our assumptions. Considerations of this sort are essential to any serious attempt at biography. An infant is not --- as our grandmothers thought --- an arbitrary jest flung into the world by a cynical deity, to be saved or…
1929 · PDF PAGE 575
…rrassed. But we had talked quite ten minutes before he said, "You will excuse me, I'm sure; but I don't understand what you mean by that last observation." This was absurd. It was some perfectly simple straightforward comment on his last book. I began to suspect him of pulling my leg in some supersubtle system invented since my return to Europe. "Are you
1929 · PDF PAGE 434
…desperately from one prospect of prosperity to another, only to find herself despised and duped by the men she was trying to deceive. At last she dropped to the depth of despair and in her drowning struggles lost her last link with life and love. She became a traitor and a thief; and bolted with her spoils to hide herself, like Fafnir, from the very eye of heaven. I failed to divine the essential hopelessness of helping her. I idealized her; I robed her in the royal vestures of romance. The power and passion of her playing inspired me. Her beau…
1929 · PDF PAGE 411
…d or so on attaining the height, second wind again on the way back after a rest, great exaustion, sudden cut into third wind and ran the last five miles --- at a rate impossible at the start of the hike! It did take two days to recover. During third wind, no pain; but the forest seemed suffused with a spectral light at dusk and strange lights moved in the sky. Probably a consequence of opiate production in the brain as a result of extreme stress reaction. could go on. The psychology of this stage was interesting. While we were walking across to…
1929 · PDF PAGE 80
… the Royal Academy recently elected him as an associate. He is hardly to be blamed for this disgrace. He struggled manfully. Even at the last moment, when he felt the thunderclouds about to break over his head, he made a last desperate coup to persuade the world that he was an artist by marrying a model. But the device deceived nobody. The evidence of his pictures was too glaring. The effort, moreover, completely exhausted his power of resistance; and he received the blow with Christian resignation. It saddens me more hat I can say to think of …
1929 · PDF PAGE 314
…y kept me away from seeking the solution in its pages, though I was their chosen confidant. They were determined that I should drain the last dregs of the vitriol. (Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificado Invenies Occultum Lapidem.) It was essential that I should learn the technique of crossing the Abyss with absolute thoroughness for they had it in mind to entrust me with the task of teaching others exactly how to do it. Thus, though I crossed the Abyss at this period, underwent one particular phase of the ordeal, I was restricted to that particu…