Co-incidence
I was just saying to a friend the other day how hard it is for me to keep track of where I read something these days. A big part of this is the amount of reading I do on a computer screen, where the unique physical aspects of a book are not a part of the experience. It’s all just text on a screen. It even seeps into my experience of reading books, and I find myself surprised when rereading something (So that’s where I read that!) or wrongly convinced that I read something in a particular book, wasting time trying to find it.
So last night I found myself doubling back on my memory because of a happenstance event. I had sat down with the Library of America edition of Edmund Wilson’s writings from the 1920s and 30s.
Though it has an attached silk bookmark, the book opened elsewhere at random and my eye caught the name “Orage.” I continued to read, all the while having a strange sense of deja vu. I had just been reading something similar. Could I in fact be remembering this particular page? I then remembered that, no, I had been reading about Orage in John Gross’s Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Now Gross mentions Wilson a few times so he must be familiar with his writings, so I have to wonder if Wilson’s pithy assessment of Orage’s fascination with Gurdjieff seeped into his own description. Here is Gross: “But the thought of [Orage] spreading the word of Gurdjieff among rich discontented New Yorkers is a profoundly depressing one.”
Here is Wilson: “I did not include in this catalogue a cult that was spreading in New York and that had converts in and around the New Republic: that of the Russo-Greek charlatan Gurdjieff, who undertook to renovate the personalities of discontented well-to-do persons.”
So the takeaway is: New York, rich/well-to-do and “discontented.”
Years ago I read James Webb’s skeptical but thorough treatment of the “The Work” (as Gurdjieff’s system is often called) The Harmonious Circle, and in all of that long book I didn’t quite boil it down to the exploiting of rich people, but as time goes on I do think there is something to that. Even the rest of the material in Gross’s book-having nothing to do with esoteric teachings-points to the rise of a large class of newly educated (and perhaps overeducated) people who didn’t seem to know what to do with their intellectual ambitions. Hence the evening lectures on literature, philosophy and science, usually given to widows, eccentric bachelors and the like. Many of the “men of letters” he writes about found careers ministering to such souls, and there was a long-standing tension between spoon-feeding the audience to make them happy, and trying to challenge them at the risk of having them go elsewhere. If this tension has slackened in recent times I suspect it is because the relatively prosperous middle class has few truly intellectual ambitions than they used to, and are instead quite happy and even proud of their allegiance to low-brow entertainment.