"Gurdjieff, G I - Beelzebubs Tales To His Grandson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gurdjieff G I)

solemn "toasting ritual", I asked him, of course in a suitable form and also according to the local complex
of "amenities" established for mutual relationship, why he did this.
Having emptied his glass at a draught and having once sung the famous Georgian song, "Little did we
tipple", inevitably sung when drinking, he leisurely began to answer as follows:
"As you drink wine not as people do today, that is to say, not merely for appearances but in fact honestly,
then this already shows me that you do not wish to know about this practice of mine out of curiosity, like
our engineers and technicians, but really owing to your desire for knowledge, and therefore I wish, and
even consider it my duty, sincerely to confess to you the exact reason of these inner, so to say,
'scrupulous considerations' of mine, which led me to this, and which little by little instilled in me such a
habit."
He than related the following:
"Formerly I used to work in this station at night cleaning the steam boilers, but when this steam whistle
was brought here, the stationmaster, evidently considering my age and incapacity for the heavy work I
was doing, ordered me to occupy myself only with releasing the steam into the whistle, for which I had
to arrive punctually every morning and evening.
"The first week of this new service, I once noticed that after performing this duty of mine, I felt for an
hour or two vaguely ill at ease. But when this strange feeling, increasing day by day, ultimately became a
definite instinctive uneasiness from which even my appetite for 'Makhokh' disappeared, I began from
then on always to think and think in order to find out the cause of this. I thought about it all particularly
intensely for some reason or other while going to and coming from my work, but however hard I tried I
could make nothing whatsoever, even approximately, clear to myself.
"It thus continued for almost two years and, finally, when the calluses on my palms had become quite
hard from the rope of the steam whistle, I quite accidentally and suddenly understood why I experienced
this uneasiness.
"The shock for my correct understanding, as a result of which there was formed in me concerning this an
unshakable conviction, was a certain exclamation I accidentally heard under the following, rather
peculiar, circumstances.
"One morning when I had not had enough sleep, having spent the first half of the night at the christening
of my neighbor's ninth daughter and the other half in reading a very interesting and rare book I had by
chance obtained and which was entitled Dreams and Witchcraft, as I was hurrying on my way to release
the steam, I suddenly saw at the corner a barber-surgeon I knew, belonging to the local government
service, who beckoned me to stop.
"The duty of this barber-surgeon friend of mine consisted in going at a certain time through the town
accompanied by an assistant with a specially constructed carriage and seizing all the stray dogs whose
collars were without the metal plates distributed by the local authorities on payment of the tax and taking
these dogs to the municipal slaughterhouse where they were kept for two weeks at municipal expense,
feeding on the slaughterhouse offal; if, on the expiration of this period, the owners of the dogs had not
claimed them and paid the established tax, then these dogs were, with a certain solemnity, driven down a
certain passageway which lead directly to a specially built oven.
"After a short time, from the other end of this famous salutary oven, there flowed, with a delightful
gurgling sound, a definite quantity of pellucid and ideally clean fat to the profit of the fathers of our town
for the manufacture of soap and also perhaps of something else, and, with a purling sound, no less
delightful to the ear, there poured out also a fair quantity of very useful substance for fertilizing.
"This barber-surgeon friend of mine proceeded in the following simple and admirably skillful manner to
catch the dogs.
"He somewhere obtained a large, old, and ordinary fishing net, which, during these peculiar excursions
of his for the general human welfare through the slums of our town, he carried, arranged in a suitable
manner on his strong shoulders, and when a dog without its 'passport' came within the sphere of his
all-seeing and, for all the canine species, terrible eye, he without haste and with the softness of a panther,
would steal up closely to it and seizing a favorable moment when the dog was interested and attracted by