In Search of the Miraculous

"But this is not what people begin with," said one of our company. "They ask: Do we admit the existence of the ether? Or how do we look on evolution? Or why do we

not believe in progress? Or why do we not think that people can and should organize

life on the basis of justice and the common good? And things of this sort."

"All questions are good," said G., "and you can begin from any question if only it is sincere. You understand that what I mean is that this very question about ether or about progress or about the common good could be asked by a man simply in order to

say something, or to repeat what someone else has said or what he has read in some

book, and on the other hand he could ask it because this is the question with which he

aches. If it is an aching question for him you can give him an answer and you can

bring him to the system through any question whatever. But it is necessary for the

question to be an aching one."

Our talks about people who could be interested in the system and able to work,

involuntarily led us towards a valuation of our friends from an entirely new point of

view. In this respect we all experienced bitter disappointment. Even before G. had

formally requested us to speak of the system to our friends we had of course all tried

in one way or another to talk about it at any rate with those of them whom we met

most often. And in most cases our enthusiasm in regard to the ideas of the system met

with a very cold reception. They did not understand us; the ideas which seemed to us

new and original seemed to our friends to be old and tedious, leading nowhere, and

even repellent. This astonished us more than anything else. We were amazed that

people with whom we had felt an inner intimacy, with whom in former times we had

been

able to talk about all questions that worried us, and in whom we had found a response,

could fail to see what we saw and above all that they could see something quite

opposite. I have to say that, in regard to my own personal experience, it gave me a

very strange even painful impression. I speak of the absolute impossibility of making

people understand us. We are of course accustomed to this in ordinary life, in the

realm of ordinary questions, and we know that people who are hostile to us at heart or

narrow-minded or incapable of thought can misunderstand us, twist and distort

anything we say, can ascribe to us thoughts we never had, words which we never

uttered, and so on. But now when we saw that all this was being done by those whom

we used to regard as our kind of people, with whom we used to spend very much of our time, and who formerly had seem to us to understand us better than anyone else, it

produced on us a discouraging impression. Such cases of course constituted the exceptions; most of our friends were merely indifferent, and all our attempts to infect them with our interest in G.'s system led to nothing. But sometimes they got a very

curious impression of us. I do not remember now who was the first to notice that our

friends found we had begun to change for the worse. They found us less interesting

than we had been before; they told us we were becoming colorless, as though we were

fading, were losing our former spontaneity, our former responsiveness to everything,

that we were becoming "machines," were ceasing to think originally, were ceasing to feel, that we were merely repeating like parrots what we heard from G.

G. laughed a great deal when we told him about this.

"Wait, there is worse to come," he said. "Do you understand what this really means? It means that you have stopped lying; at any rate you don't lie so well, that is,

you can no longer lie in so interesting a way as before. He is an interesting man who

lies well. But you are already ashamed of lying. You are now able to acknowledge to

yourselves sometimes that there is something you do not know or do not understand,

and you cannot talk as if you knew all about everything. It means of course that you

have become less interesting, less original, and less, as they say, responsive. So now you are really able to see what sort of people your friends are. And on their part they

are sorry for you. And in their own way they are right. You have already begun to

die." He emphasized this word. "It is a long way yet to complete death but still a certain amount of silliness is going out of you. You can no longer deceive yourselves

as sincerely as you did before. You have now got the taste of truth."

"Why does it seem to me sometimes now that I understand absolutely nothing?"

said one of those present. "Formerly I used to think that sometimes at any rate there were some things I understood but now I do not understand anything."

"It means you have begun to understand," said G. "When you under-

stood nothing you thought you understood everything or at any rate that you were able

to understand everything. Now, when you have begun to understand, you think you do