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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Ninette Shumway
21 February 1924.
My dearest Ninette,
Your letter reached me before my second operation, which went off admirably except that I swallowed the bulk of the inside of my head. . . Your letter was a model of composite wisdom and of course the eternal nobility of heart. The last two years have fled by.. . . I can therefore say at last with a clear conscience that I feel I have kept my word to you. There is really no place in the world to-day which you are not fundamentally fitted to hold; and you are still a very young woman.
. . . Stick to reading first rate stuff no matter how hard it seems. You should now be near the time when it comes natural to you to find delight in the wisdom of the great men of the world and to be disgusted . . . by the balderdash of the ephemeral. Let me repeat: do not worry yourself as to the question "Do I or do I not understand what this man means?" All you have to do is to go on reading and let it sink in. There is an interior apparatus which enables you in the end to make that wonder an essential part of your own spirit. Let me tell you for comfort that I began reading Shakespeare in my teens and have gone on from time to time unsystematically almost without purpose, but somehow or other getting back to him now and again; when I went to Nefta he was my only companion outside my technical studies and I read him constantly, since then I have been doing the same thing. Now this is what I want to tell you, that in the last week or two any number of passages which I had read again and again with apparent intelligence had always been dead to me, and now they have quite suddenly taken life. Now I want you to trust me that this is a natural progress. It is little use beating your head against walls of your own stupidity or giving up your author in despair. If you simply press on making him part of your life the time arises when he comes to light.
Now you after all are more in charge of the big 4 [children left at Cefalu] than any of the others and what you have to do is simply to get them into the habit of hobnobbing with the masters. Bring them up in short in the best society and don't let evil communications corrupt their best manners. Don't give them bad stuff to read apparently because they understand it and don't understand the first rate. . . . As they grow they will bring forth fruit according to the nature of the seeds which are planted. . . . [illegible]
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