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

In my opinion the trouble with you, in the present instance, is perhaps chiefly due to the fact that while
still in childhood, there was implanted in you and has now become ideally well harmonized with your
general psyche, an excellently working automatism for perceiving all kinds of new impressions, thanks to
which "blessing" you have now, during your responsible life, no need of making any individual effort
whatsoever.
Speaking frankly, I inwardly personally discern the center of my confession not in my lack of knowledge
of all the rules and procedures of writers, but in my nonpossession of what I have called the "bon ton
literary language", infallibly required in contemporary life not only from writers but also from every
ordinary mortal.
As regards the former, that is to say, my lack of knowledge of the different rules and procedures of
writers, I am not greatly disturbed.
And I am not greatly disturbed on this account, because such "ignorance" has already now become in the
life of people also in the order of things. Such a blessing arose and now flourishes everywhere on Earth
thanks to that extraordinary new disease of which for the last twenty to thirty years, for some reason or
other, especially the majority of those persons from among all the three sexes fall ill, who sleep with
half-open eyes and whose faces are in every respect fertile soil for the growth of every kind of pimple.
This strange disease is manifested by this, that if the invalid is somewhat literate and his rent is paid for
three months in advance, he (she or it) unfailingly begins to write either some "instructive article" or a
whole book.
Well knowing about this new human disease and its epidemical spread on Earth, I, as you should
understand, have the right to assume that you have acquired, as the learned "medicos" would say,
"immunity" to it, and that you will therefore not be palpably indignant at my ignorance of the rules and
procedures of writers.
This understanding of mine bids me inwardly to make the center of gravity of my warning my ignorance
of the literary language.
In self-justification, and also perhaps to diminish the degree of the censure in your waking consciousness
of my ignorance of this language indispensable for contemporary life, I consider it necessary to say, with
a humble heart and cheeks flushed with shame, that although I too was taught this language in my
childhood, and even though certain of my elders who prepared me for responsible life, constantly forced
me "without sparing or economizing" any intimidatory means to "learn by rote" the host of various
"nuances" which in their totality compose this contemporary "delight", yet, unfortunately of course for
you, of all that I then learned by rote, nothing stuck and nothing whatsoever has survived for my present
activities as a writer.
And nothing stuck, as it was quite recently made clear to me, not through any fault of mine, nor through
the fault of my former respected and nonrespected teachers, but this human labor was spent in vain
owing to one unexpected and quite exceptional event which occurred at the moment of my appearance on
God's Earth, and which was—as a certain occultist well known in Europe explained to me after a very
minute what is called "psycho-physico-astrological" investigation—that at that moment, through the hole
made in the windowpane by our crazy lame goat, there poured the vibrations of sound which arose in the
neighbor's house from an Edison phonograph, and the midwife had in her mouth a lozenge saturated with
cocaine of German make, and moreover not "Ersatz", and was sucking this lozenge to these sounds
without the proper enjoyment.
Besides from this event, rare in the everyday life of people, my present position also arose because later
on in my preparatory and adult life—as, I must confess, I myself guessed after long reflections according
to the method of the German professor, Herr Stumpsinschmausen—I always avoided instinctively as well
as automatically and at times even consciously, that is, on principle, employing this language for
intercourse with others. And from such a trifle, and perhaps not a trifle, I manifested thus again thanks to
three data which were formed in my entirety during my preparatory age, about which data I intend to
inform you a little later in this same first chapter of my writings.
However that may have been, yet the real fact, illuminated from every side like an American