And it is doubtless not for nothing that, within the exemplary portraits, we find slipped in, as experiences undergone, large unavoidable problems, regions of essential darkness around which our knowledge revolves. Forty-five years you have worked, suffered and laboured incessantly, and not once did you decide for yourself or know how to work so that, if only for a few months, the desire of your mind should become the desire of your heart. If only from the historical point of view, Remarkable Men helps us to better understand the body of Gurdjieff's work. Gurdjieff's childhood, his adolescence, his formative years appear in broad outline. No doubt certain paths are deliberately entangled.
Transmission abuts the borders of life itself.
It matters little. What has been delivered to us is more than a copy, a correspondence. Let us not try to discover geographic truths in his itineraries. Because of the faithfulness of the rendering, we find that Meetings includes as a sub-theme remarkable sociological landscapes, such as that of Tsarist Russia, reminiscent of a somewhat more acerbic version of Chekov. What remains is to determine the internal logic of the tale, to identify the thread that guides us through unforeseen trials, each one of which representing the nature of a find.