|
Correspondence from Norman Mudd to Charles Stansfeld Jones
[EXTRACT]
[15 January 1923]
My interest in the Great Work dates from Dec 1907 when I first met Crowley at Cambridge—thereafter enjoying, at intervals, his knowledge and conversation. There is no need for me to attempt to describe the effect which this meeting had upon me. I then understood for the first time what life was or might be; and the spark of that understanding has been in me ever since, apparently unquenchable.
During the two years, 1908.9, it had been customary whenever Crowley came to Cambridge, for one of our circle at Trinity to put him up at the College and collect a company in our rooms to meet him, talk to him and listen to the papers he used to read us. In June 1910 however, the College authorities , for reasons best known to themselves, decided that the presence of Crowley in the College was no longer tolerable; further that his association with members of the College must be prohibited.
. . . at the time I was quite young (18), utterly ignorant of the world, of bourgeois and rather unmanly upbringing, with a character entirely common-place and devoid of any spark of the heroic. I was certainly gifted, creatively, with considerable mathematical talent (not however even approximating to genius) and on the receptive side with an unusual poetic sensibility.
The accumulated pressure of these repeated failures made me feel that I must go to Crowley personally for help and advice. The feeling was purely instinctive, I suppose, for I had no clear idea of what he could do for me; I simply felt, more or less clearly, an urgent need of confession and absolution; without trying to imagine how I might get it.
The miserable truth is that through my own personal cowardice, I choose the chance of a congenial worldly career before what I knew to be the highest thing that ever had or ever would come into my life. Or, to put it otherwise, I knowingly and deliberately betrayed the one thing by which I could really live, from base fear of worldly consequences. I will not now describe either the outward humiliation that was then put upon me, nor the hell of shame and remorse and miscellaneous damnation in which I agonised for months, nor yet the weak attempts I made to save some shreds of my self respect.
|