In Search of the Miraculous

I wanted very much to introduce some of my Moscow friends to G., but from

among all those whom I met during these days only one, my old newspaper friend V.

A. A., produced the impression of being sufficiently alive, although he was as usual

overloaded with work and rushing from one place to another. But he was very

interested when I told him about G. and with G.'s permission I invited him to have

lunch at G.'s place.—

G. summoned about fifteen of his people and arranged a lunch which, at that time, was

luxurious, with zakuski, pies, shashlik, Khaghetia wine, and so on, in a word it was one of those Caucasian lunches that begin at midday and last until the evening.—He

seated A. near him, was very kind to him, entertained him all the time, and poured out

wine for him. My heart suddenly fell when I realized to what a test I had brought my

old friend. The fact was that everyone kept silence. A. held out for five minutes. Then

he began to talk. He spoke of the war, of all our allies and enemies together and

separately; he communicated the opinions of all the public men of Moscow and St.

Petersburg upon all possible subjects; then he talked about the desiccation of

vegetables for the army (with which he was then occupied in addition to his

journalistic work), particularly the desiccation of onions, then about artificial manures, agricultural chemistry, and chemistry in general; about "melioration"; about spiritism, the "materialization of hands," and about what else I do not remember now. Neither G.

nor anyone else spoke a single word. I was on the point of speaking fearing that A.

would be offended, but G. looked at me so fiercely that I stopped short. Besides, my

fears were in vain. Poor A. noticed nothing, he was so carried away by his own talk

and his own eloquence that he sat on happily at the table and talked without stopping

for a moment until four o'clock. Then with great feeling he shook hands with G. and

thanked him for his "very interesting conversation." G., looking at me, laughed slyly.

I felt very ashamed. They had made a fool of poor A. He certainly could not have

expected anything of the kind, so he was caught. I realized that G. had given a

demonstration to his people.

"There, you see," he said, when A. had gone. "He is called a clever man. But he would not have noticed it even if I had taken his trousers off him. Only let him talk.

He wants nothing else. And everybody is like that. This one was much better than

many others. He told no lies. And he really knew what he talked about, in his own

way of course. But think, what use is he? He is no longer young. And perhaps this was

the one time in his life when there was an opportunity of hearing the truth. And he

talked himself all the time."

Of the Moscow talks with G. I remember one which is connected with another talk

in St. Petersburg I have already given.

This time G. himself began to speak.

"What do you find is the most important thing of all you have learned up to now?"

he asked me.

"The experiences, of course, which I had in August," I said. "If I were able to evoke them at will and use them, it would be all that I could wish for because I think that

then I should be able to find all the rest. But at the same time I know that these

'experiences,' I choose this word

only because there is no other, but you understand of what I speak"—he nodded—

"depended on the emotional state I was in then. And I know that they will always

depend on this. If I could create such an emotional state in myself I should very

quickly come to these experiences. But I feel infinitely far from this emotional state,

as though I were asleep. This is 'sleep' that was being awake.—How can this

emotional state be created? Tell me."

"There are three ways," said G. "First, this state can come by itself, accidentally.

Second, someone else can create it in you. And third, you can create it yourself.

Which do you prefer?"

I confess that for a second I had a very strong desire to say that I preferred someone

else, that is, him, to create in me the emotional state of which I was speaking. But I at once realized that he would say that he had already done it once and that now I ought

either to wait until this came itself or that I ought to do something myself to get it.

"I want of course to create it myself," I said. "But how can it be done?"

"I have already said before that sacrifice is necessary," said G. "Without sacrifice nothing can be attained. But if there is anything in the world that people do not

understand it is the idea of sacrifice. They think they have to sacrifice something that

they have. For example, I once said that they must sacrifice 'faith,' 'tranquillity,'

'health.' They understand this literally. But then the point is that they have not got

either faith, or tranquillity, or health. All these words must be taken in quotation

marks. In actual fact they have to sacrifice only what they imagine they have and

which in reality they do not have. They must sacrifice their fantasies. But this is