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Page 222 of 2251929 · PDF PAGE 249
…nnot blame anyone; my ideas were perhaps hardly practicable. Something should doubtless have been done about the level crossing, where a man going at sixty miles an hour or so came off second best when he hit a cart. But that is a rare chance. The constant danger is that an unskilful rider thrown over the walls of Battledore and Shuttlecock may strike the same place as a previous misadventurer. In this case he will land, not on soft snow but on an irregular mass of regelated ice. He is sure to cut himself and may easily get killed. The walls of…
1929 · PDF PAGE 364
…ant taxes to support a swarm of useless jacks in office. Of course I may be looking at this incident in a totally wrong light. The policeman may have mistaken my act as symbolic of a wish to linger in Gibraltar and deduced that I must be dangerously insane. Next to Avon, it is probably the most ghastly place on the globe. In a previous incarnation I either insulted a Buddha, or wounded a universal Holy King, or killed my father and mother --- at least I can suggest no better an hypothesis to explain my having been held up sometimes as much a fo…
1929 · PDF PAGE 450
…of hunger for some satisfaction beyond earth's power to supply. We came together with irresistible magnetism. We could not converse in human language. I had forgotten nearly all my Russian; and her German was confined to a few broken cries. But we had not need of speech. The love between us was ineffably intense. It still inflames my inmost spirit. She had passed beyond the region where pleasure had meaning for her. She could only feel through pain, and my own means of making her happy was to inflict physical cruelties as she directed. This kin…
1929 · PDF PAGE 194
…s exclusively of rocks, streams and dried apricots. The last named are its principal export. A moment --- and I understood! The poor old man had been unable to cross the plateau and was returning home to die! I expressed my sympathy and offered help. Oh, no, not at all! He had carried his sack all the way to Srinagar; but finding on arrival that the price of his produce had gone down by a fraction of a penny a pound, he refused to sell and was bringing the stuff back. The sack itself looked fabulous, so I got out the "butcher's terror" and foun…
1929 · PDF PAGE 29
…tensely loyal even to my enemies, and (for all I knew) the judge might send my mother and her brother to prison. So I lied like a little man and pretended that I was perfectly happy at the school. I do not think that he was entirely fooled by my protestations; and although I was not made a ward in Chancery, a promise was exacted that I should go to a public school and university as soon as I had passed the "Cambridge Local". Meanwhile, nature took my part. At the end of the first term of my punishment I was so obviously ill during the holidays …
1929 · PDF PAGE 169
… make two or three marches with us, but as a rule they were changed every day. Except on one or two occasions when the ignorance and bad manners of the Austrians let to misunderstanding, everything went smoothly. The naivety of the natives was sometimes very amusing. The regular rate of pay was fourpence a day, and this princely profusion induced the inhabitants of distant side valleys to make sometimes as much as six days' march in each direction from their homes to some point on our route. They would then disseminate themselves among the crow…
1929 · PDF PAGE 546
…at each other as equals. I destroyed the idea of possession. When a child needed attention, I insisted on a spirit of comradeship almost manly in tone. If a wound had to be dressed there must be no slopping over of sympathy. The child must not whimper and abdicate his dignity nor the mother disgrace the dignity of her function as healer. At first I feared that habit and convention would be hard to overcome. But I was surprised how soon all four found their feet. This {861} self-respect and respect for others made them disclaim the abject attitu…
1929 · PDF PAGE 550
… My precise motive in going to Paris eludes me. I seem to have acted upon general principles. My visit proved eventful. Firstly, I met a man named Sullivan, "a fellow almost damned with a fair wife" named Sylvia. They had been married some time and she had developed a pain in the old place. A friend of hers asked my advice. I gave it, not suspecting the object of her solicitude. The situation suddenly developed by Sylvia and myself starting trouble. Sullivan came of the people. His brilliant brain had pulled him up to the position of "mathemati…
1929 · PDF PAGE 393
…had anything up to three columns on the case. On the very day of publication, for the first time, I found myself famous and my work in demand. As a side issue, Mathers having claimed in court to be the Chief of the Rosicrucian Order, I was invaded by an innumerable concourse of the queerest imaginable people, each of whom independently asserted that he himself, and he alone, was that Chief. Having my own information on the subject, though communicating it to nobody else, I got rid of these pests as quickly as possible. One of my callers, howeve…
1929 · PDF PAGE 272
…s. The maharajah was away for the day. He had sent his Minister of Public works to meet me and entertain me until his return. This gentleman, whose name was Martin, had taken a high degree at Oxford, and had studied science and engineering very thoroughly. No one could have suspected that he had a Bengali grandmother. But in the first twenty-four hours I had discovered the truth of the aphorism "Blood will tell". For all his European education, he believed in the most primitive superstitions, from ghosts and witches to mysterious medicines. {44…
1929 · PDF PAGE 427
…a wide open gate through which we could see a gang of workmen engaged in pretending to repair a ramshackle villa. Virakam called the foreman and asked in broken Italian if the place was to let. He told her no; it was under repair. With crazy confidence she dragged him within and forced him to show her over the house. I sat in resigned disgust, not deigning to follow. Then my eyes suddenly saw down the garden, two trees close together. I stooped. Their tops appeared. They were Persian nuts! The stupid coincidence angered me, and yet some irresis…
1929 · PDF PAGE 125
…im almost insane. I hardly know how he got down to us at last, except that on those loose slopes he could hardly help it. Having put our man through the mill, we became seriously friendly. He took his lesson like a good sportsman and made his {219} apologies in the Mexican Herald, by writing a long account of his adventure in the style of the then famous Mr. Dooley. Eckenstein and I lived in an American apartment house, from the roof of which one could see a great distance down a principal thoroughfare. Eckenstein used to lure people to discuss…
1929 · PDF PAGE 244
…d it with Eckenstein, and I would have refused to follow him had he wished to attempt it himself! I led up the pitch with Bott as second man and Back as third. I reached the most critical part of the climb. My holds were the merest friction holds. I could not have supported a rabbit. I half expected to come off; and I knew that Bott (though reasonably safe himself, or I should not have gone on) could no nothing to save me if I fell. Back, in a perfectly safe position far below (we had a long rope), saw how insecure I was. He completely lost his…
1929 · PDF PAGE 67
…e, or the left bright green and the right orange, and so on. I record, with regret, that I, who had refused to abdicate the dignity of humanity to this extent, was the only person in the party who was not badly burnt. The sun showed no respect to persons in the matter of their camouflage. My freedom was due to the fact that I had spent most of my life in the open air and gradually acquired immunity. It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence: that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our mo…
1929 · PDF PAGE 65
…ngs. In other words, I wanted to evoke the denizens of the other planes to visible and audible appearance. This resolution was the first manifestation of my true will. I had thrown myself with the utmost enthusiasm into various occupations from time to time, but they had never occupied my entire attention. I had never given myself wholly to chess, mountaineering or even to poetry. Now, for the first time, I felt myself prepared to expend my resources of every kind to attain my purpose. To me the spiritual world consisted roughly of the Trinity …
1929 · PDF PAGE 566
…osal, he suddenly broke away. "What would happen to the English market?" he wailed. "What do they care about American writers?" "My dear man," I replied, "the whole point of the game is that you have told me again and again that the English market is hopeless. Whatever you do you cannot win out in England. And even if the American campaign does diminish your sale by a few hundred copies, what's that as against the
1929 · PDF PAGE 341
…iscover me and a swift shudder passed through me as I apprehended my danger. Fortunately, I had sufficient presence of mind to resume my mantra and melt away from the multitude as silently as I had descended upon it. This little adventure always stood out as one of the most exciting (in a small way) of my life, that is, of merely material adventures; and it has given me furiously to think about the general formulae of "Energized Enthusiasm". The practices of the Sidi Aissawa, the dervishes, some Asiatic devotees, and many Russian peasants whom …
1929 · PDF PAGE 10
…e", it had to be supplemented by a voluntary acceptance of Christ as one's personal saviour. This being so, the question arose whether Roman Catholics, Anglicans or even Nonconformists could possibly be saved. The general feeling seems to have been that it was impossible for anyone who was once actually saved to be lost, whatever he did1. But it was, of course, beyond human power to determine whether any given individual had or had not found salvation. This, however, was clear: that any teaching or acceptance of false {41} 1. "Of those that tho…
1929 · PDF PAGE 343
…e do, whether ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God." One night in Granada I met one of these gypsies. The setting was supremely romantic. The burden of his life fell from the shoulders of the poet. I experienced that spontaneous and irresistible stroke of love which only exists when the beauty of the human form and the beauty of the rest of nature are harmonized automatically. It was one of those experiences which come even to the most romantic poets, and to them only too few times in a decade. Fuller always maintained that the lyric in …
1929 · PDF PAGE 95
…rent. It was not long before it caught me. I had a number of conversations with Julian Baker, who kept his promise to introduce me to "a man who was a much greater Magician than he was himself". This was a Welshman, named George Cecil Jones. He possessed a fiery but unstable temper, was the son of a suicide, and bore a striking resemblance to many conventional representations of Jesus Christ. His spirit was both ardent and subtle. He was very widely read in Magick; and, being by profession an analytical chemist, was able to investigate the subj…