111

the core of my being. I did not want it to perish utterly. I worked to detach it from my body. I wanted to tear it out of myself and throw it ~~back~~ to its new beginning, in order that the perils of the dying body should not reach it.

Now I could scarcely see all that I most adore. I heard the nurse say, "It is noon". But I was talking to the night. It was a simple night, without moon or stars. On the earth the flowers were resting from their colours. I knew them only by their sleeping perfumes.

## space

On the mantlepiece, in front of the window-pane, is a basket of Parma violets. A shutter has been lowered behind it, only at the bottom can I see the light - that miracle. I think of all the people who walk in the daylight seeking - what? Objects, other people. All is mysterious. What must I do to begin to live? Why not die? Because I have done nothing with myself; and because I know there is something to be done. I know all the flaws in the systems of salvation - they start from words, they get lost in words, they end in words. I know that one must give words a body- produce its organs, develop its muscles. Otherwise nothing holds. How can we aspire to survival when we have not known life?

## space

With a great effort I stretched out my arm and drew a handerchief over the luminous hours of my clock, but I knew the hour nevertheless. It was the one that was bound to come, the

112

one that casts a shadow behind the others, the one that awaits
its own striking - the hour of life. The hour that is an end is
the only one that counts. Each minute contains a complete ex-
istence. Minutes are an army in motion, marching toward me.

space

I wonder if in these hours I really conceived an exact
idea of death. Is this possibly right while one is still in life?
I was engaged above all by the great tasks which seemed to me
urgent. One of them was to follow a thread
my coming into the world. It was ravelled long before
me by people I did not know,
Generations had tangled and knotted the threads. I worked
feverishly, trying to unknot a single one - to know my place
of origin, or mark my essence with some guiding sign in order
to see, perhaps, my destination.

space

These were days that I remember with awe. They were
not mine alone, I shared them with a succession of circles
which opened to me on another plane. I have tried to return
there to recapture their meanings, but it is not possible.
For me those days were a rehearsal of death. I am moved
when I think of this, as if God had given me a special gift;
life is like a door a little open since my incursion to the
end of the known.

I felt my body dying, but my will remained violently

113

alive. I had already taken leave of the little islands which enclose happiness or unhappiness, pleasure or tears. But I did not have to take leave of love. It was an emotion too essential to die with the body. While I lived my body had participated in the feast of love like a distinguished guest - a guest who even thinks that without his presence there would be no feast. All the senses and their intoxicating enchantment were disappearing. But the approach of death could not break them off cleanly - their bright filaments trailed from the heavens to my bed.

## Convalescence

In October I went to Vernet-les-Bains in the Pyrénées-Orientales to recuperate.

The first stage of convalescence is a resurrection; but after that I was placed in a pillory of prohibitions - commanded not to read, write, feel or admire; to do nothing, want nothing, aspire to nothing and above all to be interested in nothing; to communicate no longer with the things about me, to keep the needle of the dial on the word "indifference" and not even suffer from it; to hold a volume of Rimbaud in my two hands without opening it; to see the moon's reflection on the snow peaks without allowing my heart to quicken; to endure the hours formlessly in one unchanging rhythm until gradually I should begin to live again.

The little box we lived in was only a lid placed on the ground, deep in the country. It was the barest possible exis-

114

tence - a bone of life. Outside my window fountains of willow trees
swayed, spraying the sky with brilliant yellow when the wind blew
I had a friendly feeling for the small mountain to the south; it
turned green with the rain and told me the time by its pale shadow

Between one and four o'clock I waited for the coming and going
of the white bull that passed on the road beside the grey stone
wall, his measured tread noble among the disordered rows of cows,
his Greek profile raised in obstinacy above the cautious assur-
ance of his step.

In December the great snows came. The villagers told us
that more than once the town had been isolated during long winter
days - no mail, telegraph or trains. Our box-lid was barely
distinguishable from the fields it lay upon. Finally the sun came
out and a little bird came through my open window. He flew to
the table where I kept a small fir tree. There he installed him-
self as if he were at home. I loved his visit and I should have
liked to do something charming for him, but we only sat and looked
at each other. We remained like that for a long time.

## Operation

In the spring we returned to the lighthouse. The forest
behind it was full of winged lives and light songs, the river
below was gay with rushing tides. One Sunday I came in from
the woods, my arms filled with flowers. At the doorstep I bent
down to plunge them into a tub of water, a shock of pain stabbed
me and I fainted.

115

In the morning, at the American Hospital, nurses came to prepare me. My silence was starred with the flowers I had gathered the evening before, I still felt my hands hot among their green stems.

One falls into an illness, one walks into an operation. You could even walk to the _salle d'execution_, but it is customary to be carried there, intact and consenting. My bed was rolled through corridors on rubber wheels. I was in a soundless world, but life there was crude and cruel. I was thinking as one prays. And I realized how ready this silent figure was for pain and the ~~last risk.~~

The elevator rose to the top floor. There everything was of a dazzling _radiance_ - white masks, white coats, a glass cage in a white sky, and an opaque silence for a _rendez-vous_ full of pomp, like a ceremony for an unreal death.

After an operation there is none of that bloom of afterillness when it seems as if a delicate sap were surging in an unknown season. Something deep within you hesitates. Courage again or renouncement? A sort of ancestral cowardice rises and covers life with a dead water. All that constitutes a being, from the first day to the last, is forced into the struggle. One's manner of thinking changes completely. Thought no longer spreads, it runs like a black line on paper.

Later, as danger withdrew, I lost this brevity of thought. All the useless associations, the superfluous speculations, returned. I was saved, but restored to habit - to all that we call normal life.

space

space

116

During my struggle with death I had thought, "If I am to
live, I swear to myself to go further than before. . . I do not
give myself the right to come out of danger in the same state in
which I entered it".

And now I was "restored to habit, to normal life" . . . and
I was accepting it! A cry of revulsion rose in me, rested pet-
fified in my throat. I sensed that a new cycle of catasthraphes
would begin if I could not, by a supreme effort, turn my life
at last toward its high aim. I must begin to understand better
what I already understood, all that the past had taught me in
showing me that what is essential lies elsewhere.

This life of mine which in the past had seemed beautiful
- had none of it served a purpose? This perfumed wax in
which I had modelled my years of art, of love, and of
faith in both - was this all that I could contribute to the
miracle of a life on earth? No, no, I was ready to step from
the present into what would be, at last, the future - that
future which is in us and awaits our attention.

117

Chapter #8ight
A Well of Water

"But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life". - St. John 4, 14.

And so, armed with a supreme resolution, I arrived at that moment of life which is called descending the other side of the hill, but which to me is an ascension.

When people reach my age they announce in a tone of curious satisfaction that they are getting old, their task is done, they can now relax, it is for others to live. They judge life to be finished when to me it has barely begun. They see it as a curve, when it should be an ascending line. To me, life begins at fifty and never stops growing. All that is worth living begins at that moment. It is the moment to live "autre chose".

I have the feeling that I have lived all my life for my particular present. I must admit that I have not finished with art and moonlight, music and spring, and that I will never be insensible to all the delights that are the adorable froth of the earth. But these delights are now no longer between my sight and my life. Learning to "live" demands no startling abdications. It leaves old delights their place, but not their ancient power. It brings a new purpose, a new fire, and infinite new ways of seeing all things.

Space

118

space

In the last four years the year 1936 arrived, physically. I had surmounted three grave illnesses in the last four years, but I had not yet regained my familiar endless energies. Psychically I had stripped off the tatters of a past that had clung to me for so long.

Gurdjieff was again in Paris and I was able to see him continually until the war began in 1939. Of that constant association with him, of that work toward "development" which no well-being, no happiness, could equal for me, I find it almost impossible to speak.

Many people have investigated doctrines analogous to the Gurdjieff science. To write of them in a word, in a few words, in infinite words, is to deform them - the truth that can enter into a formula is limited. To write abstractly of Gurdjieff's conceptions in relation to other great systems of thought, belief, religion, is equally futile. I know the danger of verbalizing over abstract ideas - unless it is to repudiate them. Negations are treated kindly, and the thinker who offers nothing but a hypothesis is always respected. An hypothesis is a life-belt for the mind; thanks to it, the mind floats a little longer before sinking.

I know, too, what the very term "search for truth" suggests of the absurd, the pretentious, the erroneous, the hysterical. Research seems futile. It is less so, however, than to settle one's self comfortably, eyes closed, into a life of which one understands nothing.

And so, in relation to Gurdjieff's doctrine, which became for me "truth", I shall tell simply what I have felt, experienced

119

and understood. I shall not say what I hope from it, but what I have learned to want from it. I shall try to tell what it has done for me in transforming my aspirations into a single and total energy.

In the little red diary which lies before me on my desk I reread the record of what I felt, experienced and understood during those three years. I live again the exaltation and the agony of those daily efforts I made to awaken and develop what was sleeping in me, as in all human beings.

I have copied out some pages of this diary - words written from time to time in the long nights without sleep which became my nights of light.

## Diary

Paris, June, 1936. Apartment finally found, rue Casimir

Périer, between the church and trees.

Often in pain. Difficult epoch, but marvelous end of month because of my new meeting with Girdjieff. Went to see him in the Café de la Paix where he always sits before lunch.

"Time passes for me", I said to him, "and I make no progress. I have not many more years to live; will you allow me to read the new parts of your manuscript?"

He looked long at me. At last he said, "You still have time to live. Yes, come to lunch tomorrow and you will read". He murmured words I did not understand, Finally I caught, "You are young, but liver sick, all organs blocked" He paused and then said, "Yes, I will do for you". I wanted to cry out my gratitude but I restrained myself, knowing that he understood all I felt. I articulated painfully, "Thank you".

June 22. Lunched with him, his family and a few pupils in

120

his apartment. After lunch he showed me a little room and a cupboard where he would leave the manuscript for me. He said I might come and read whenever I liked.

**June 27.** Every day I spend two or three hours in his flat. I read with concentration, as if my life depended on the difficult thought that comes from his pages.

**June 28.** I'll again. Couldn't go to read.

**June 30.** Last night had an acute crisis of pain which involved all the nerves of the solar plexus. But I shall go to read tomorrow.

**Thursday July 16.** I am much better. Told Gurdjieff that for the first time in years I have slept the night through. He was glad, and not surprised. He assured me that I would recover, that he had a plan for me, and repeated a second time, "You are young". I understood later that he was referring to my healthy glands. He explained that the first part of the work would take five years, that the body must be strong enough to march with the spirit, because the world of spirit depends on the body which carries it. In Thibet, where he spent so many years of his life, the priests are doctors and the doctors priests.

At lunch he told the others that my case interested him - "She was candidate for death, she is already candidate for life". Then he looked at them with eyes of mischief. "I only said to her, Read the book, madame, read the book!"

**July 20.** What physical amazement when I find I can lie full length on the bed, after so many years of half-reclining; and what astonishment in a body that is dreading pain which does not come. I often feel a great internal heat, as if I were close to a fire. I sleep without waking. I believe that a silent and healing perturbation is taking place in me. I understand what is happening, but to live it is unbelievable.

121

**July 27.** Arrived at his flat, dragging myself along. Received the book for three hours. When I left I felt light and strong. Walked two kilometres without weariness. Physically I am living a springtime in this cold month of July. I feel charged like a dynamo.

**July 30.** Gurdjieff came in while I was reading. I was at the end of the chapter on religions. Told him my exaltation in as few words as possible - he doesn't like "manifestations". He was visibly satisfied.

**End of August.** Never any more pain. I discern something immense that is happening in me. Evidently the brain is not our sole organ of control - other organs also register what takes place in us, and perhaps more accurately than the brain does. I have the impression of a wheel turning within me, motored by a renewed bloodstream and by my conscious will to receive the help given me. I am experiencing the wonderment of something that is not hereditary.

**September 27.** For several months it has been clear that men are unconsciously creating what they call the inevitable - that is, war; and at the same time declaring sincerely that they want only peace.

**September 30.** Every day I go to study his manuscript. I consider it the authentic event of my life.

The time of destruction - the war - ~~ approaches. ~~
Yet we work to finish our apartment, which is more and more
adorable because of the arched doorways we have constructed
throughout. Sooner or later we will lose it.

I have a special anguish as I realize the strength of
the energies restored to me. Desires, needs, wishes now assail
me, after three years in which I have tried to reconcile my-
self to the idea of death.

122

Independent

**October 29.** Another period of dark days. Since I am no longer tense with perpetual suffering, I feel a curious laxness. And then winter is on the way. My organism follows the uneasiness of the earth beneath its pale colours. The branches of trees make mechanical gestures towards the sky. One's organism has its habits. Because mine has suffered so long it wants to go on suffering. It is more nervous, more sensitive. And I feel myself slipping, I have moments of discouragement. I try not to admit them but they are there nevertheless.

**October 31.** I described my state to him. He already knew and his words brought me comfort, for he made me understand how the law of up-and-down works in all functioning.

**Monday, the 2nd of November.** A great emotion today. When I arrived at Gurdjieff's apartment it was he himself who opened the door. I said immediately, "I am completely well, I am in a new body". The light that came from the little salon illuminated him fully. Instead of avoiding it, he stepped back and leaned against the wall. Then, for the first time, he let me see what he really is . . . as if he had torn off the masks behind which he is obliged to hide himself. His face was stamped with a charity that embraced the whole world. Transfixed, standing before him, I saw him with all my strength and I experienced a gratitude so deep, so sad, that he felt a need to calm me. With an unforgettable look he said, "God helps me!"

**November 4.** From the beginning he has said, "I can prevent pain and therefore prepare the ground for something else". I know that he means a special work, in which the tempo of the spirit will keep pace with the physical recovery. But have I the strength to undertake it?

**November 25.** Tonight after dinner Gurdjieff played his little accordion-piano. Unique spectacle. This is the man who says, "I try to be a man without quotation marks".

123

As he played one saw a man live - as complete as a circle.
And the richness of his smile! Richness of bounty, richness
of truth.

**Christmas Eve.** Extraordinary reunion at his flat to-
night. Another age - a patriarch distributing treasures.
The little apartment was full - his family, friends of his
family, the concierge and his family, old servants from other
days. The Christmas tree, too big, too high, was bent
against the ceiling and its stars hung down.

The distribution of gifts was a true ceremony. Fifty
or more large boxes, numbered, occupied a corner of the salon.
Gurdjieff, standing in front of a table, glasses on his nose,
held a list in his hand. To each box that was set before
him he added notes of a hundred or five hundred francs; then
he called a name corresponding to a number and presented the
box, making a brief gesture that signifies "Don't thank me".
The last to come forward was a Danish doctor who received a
handsome dressing-gown and a thousand-franc note. As Gurd-
jieff placed the money in the box, S. said, "He's going to be
happy, that one". Gurdjieff answered like lightning, "Not
you?"

At ten o'clock supper was served. On each plate was an enor-
mous piece of mutton, a stuffed Russian roll, pickles, pep-
pers preserved in oil - all the things I hold in horror; but
superb desserts were spread out - cakes, fruits, candies of a
thousand-and-one-nights. We left at midnight and other people
took our places. The Russian maid said to me, "From one
o'clock till dawn the poor will be coming".

We know that for him a period of fasting will follow
this feast, to balance so many days of abundance.

**December 30.** Resurrection . . . absorbing and
primordial question for me - the successive deaths and the
perpetual renewals of life : addition of what was, what
is, and what will be. A new kind of resurrection begins in
me - I am invaded by the all-powerfulness of spirit. This

124

surpasses life itself.

December 31. If I am able to understand Gurdjieff a little in his entirety, it is because I have studied him and his doctrine for over twelve years. One of his greatest values is knowing how to render intelligent to human understanding the truths that are the most impossible for the mind of man to conceive.

My intelligence - no, I don't value it; and anyway, in these matters, intelligence moves into second place. What I have always valued ⭐ in myself is not my intelligence but a fundamental lucidity which has never failed me in all the disasters of my ⭐ existence. Before my experience with Gurdjieff I saw the time approaching when this lucidity alone would be left in me, like a flag on an empty house.

space

My notes from January, 1937, to the following December show only long months of effort - the climbing and falling known to all those who have tried ⭐ to follow the difficult "road of knowledge".

But what does this vague phrase, road of knowledge, mean?
Philosophers claim that all knowledge can be found within four walls, in books. Yet everyone can read Hermes, Pythagoras, Buddhism, the Bible, and remain blind before these closed codes. It is not enough to read, admire, speculate. The study of "Know thyself" demands a special work and a life given up to it. One must begin the work. What one has learned, one must incorporate. The time that stretches between these two states is full of pain. But all initiation holds a period of panic, just as all work

125

holds within it the same laws : the road which at first appears to be vertical becomes less steep as one climbs.

Some of the pages of my diary during this period are almost incoherent with despair. At other moments I had no despair, neither had I hope. I was living in a tunnel. Then on the tenth of October I wrote :

> I know that I am approaching a momentous state. I know the balance I must maintain in all the coming tests, and some lines of Goethe haunt me : "No path! It is the jungle that one cannot penetrate . . . And then in the eternally empty distance you will see nothing, you will not hear the sound of your footsteps, you will have nothing upon which to rest . . . "

> I know this and I detest my anguish. However great it is I judge it to be small. Yet I am afraid - with a thousand fears which have no name. It is my parents, my ancestors, who are afraid in me. Why listen to their fears? I was not so afraid when I faced death. Was that, then, more natural? Yes.

> Others before me have done what I am doing. But that does not help me - each person's experience is different. I envy those who plunge in without hesitating. I am ashamed of my hesitation, I seem to be bargaining. A small life for a great truth - I must choose. Yet I want to discuss the choice with myself before I give up this self to its task. I will advance in darkness; "seeing" will be abolished for the sake of "being". The hardest moment of all will arrive. The guide will watch me stumble, exhaust myself, and will say nothing. His words were : "I cannot develop you. I can create conditions in which you can develop yourself".

**October 12.** I had a dream. I walked for years, searching a planet. Across space I arrived. At first I thought that the cities, the people, the things, were like

126

ours. Soon I saw that all was different. People loved
one another and they did not speak. The animals spoke.

I had a long conversation with a white horse as
large as a cathedral. He explained his two-dimensional
vision and his terrors. He understood that I was burning,
and to relieve me he hung his mane like a rain about my
body. It was he who explained the celebration of a fête
such as does not exist in our world. Three seasons had
conquered the fourth. I watched the triumphal return of
the troops - regiments of all the countries advanced, flags
flying, followed by springtimes and early autumns. They
had killed the winters.

They were not accompanied by good and evil. Their
songs were bell-shaped, their laughter was like the sunlit sea.
To amuse themselves along the way they had disciplined
plagues, abolished pain, hunted down calumny. My com-
panion said, "With winter dead, they have
killed the inevitable. Now death will be no more than a
result - the consequence of not having understood".

Suddenly one of the men fell from high up on to the
ground before me. He split in two. He was empty.

October 18. The important moment is here, my choice has
been made. Tomorrow we will ask Gurdjieff - Margaret and
I - whether the time has come for us to begin our real work.

When I really begin, nothing will have changed in
appearances. I will still have my name that I do not
like, I will be dressed as I am now. I will go tomorrow
morning and simply say to Gurdjieff, "I will do". Just
these three words, but for me, before myself, they will
be the authentic beginning of my life. When I say these
words I will see before me a succession of unknown experi-
ences which I will pass through, without perceiving the
end. My end, I believed, would be my death. Now there
comes an end before the end, a death before my death. And
it is to win a life.

127

**October 19.** Five o'clock in the morning, in my room, Casimir Périer. The sky is pale blue behind the still trees. All is happy and calm. Why, why, did I have to learn that one can live beyond this easy, lovely human life? I loved that life...

At eleven o'clock Margaret and I will ask Gurdjieff to begin.

Later. He has agreed, and given us a rendez-vous at his flat tomorrow at one.

**October 20, 1937.** As soon as we arrived he explained again all that we already knew : the need to be sure; to realize that the work would become more and more difficult; that it was not too late to say "no". He didn't speak of rewards. The first for me is that he wants us to work together, helping each other.

**October 21, late afternoon.** Divine weather in the Luxembourg Gardens, with whirling dead leaves. I sat on a bench near the fountain and thought about the new work Gurdjieff had explained this morning in a manner so clear, so total, that I understood it without understanding all his words. For me it is the long-awaited revelation, so real that it has infinite repercussions in my being.

Many years ago - it may be forty - I wrote to Maeterlinck : "I do not know if you understand me - I am comparable to a bubble that floats in the air and is attached to nothing real; even in the depths of myself I feel that I am not. One single preoccupation, perhaps, exists in this void - it is my anxiety at seeing myself thus; and, as if/ to change, I must accomplish something unknown. It comes from very far in me, like a lost idea, a commandment to which I can give no form; and I search, I search"...

Today, a life later, now that I have found at last what one can do, I see again those words, "As if, to change, I must accomplish something unknown".

128

Eleven o'clock at night. Today, this 20th of October,
1937, I have lived a few real moments.

End of December. I am living too hard, I am tired, my
sleep is made of paper.

If at this moment I saw death approaching, I would not
accept it as I did in the hospital beds where I spent so
many months. Now my time is heavy with a true abundance
of which I never dreamed.

I said to Gurdjieff, "I am almost afraid - life
rises in me like the sea". He repeated, "It is only a small
beginning".

## space

The lighthouse, summer, 1938.

Now that I have collected my notes written during my
"change of route", I am struck by an essential paradox which
I find hard to understand. What was that anguish, that des-
pair, which was in me and yet so far from me? It took
place so far from my lived life that it never had a voice, not
one audible cry. Why that pain when I had no pain? Is "the
soul", then, really elsewhere? I did not know it had to suf-
fer so to beget itself. Since it is my life, how could it
have been so outside my human days?

I write these words in the circle of a flashlight,
in order not to disturb the two sleepers who might see a glow
in my room and think me ill. I had been sleeping after
assembling my notes, this afternoon and all evening. Now
it is night - three o'clock in the morning. Through the
window the moon and its reflection in the water touch my
bed. . . I was asleep and suddenly my sleep was torn in two
by an idea: where did that despair of which I wrote take

129

place, when my life was so happy? . . . The circle of
light falls clearly on my notebook, I hear the silky pulse
of a passing boat, a red glow moves across the ceiling. . . . I have lived for years in the shadow of a deep
preoccupation which, however, clarified me and uncovered
many things to my sight. Is it that my subconscious has
its own life which does not identify itself with mine?
Mine could be in peace while the other was living its own
personal drama? That drama is like a love that has no name,
no face, and that struggles perpetually to take a form, to
BE and to give being to someone. That someone was I, who
did not know it.

LE CANNET, Alpes Maritimes, 1940