Word: pilgrims
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...delicately wrought signpost to the spiritual life is a small book, apparently written some time in the mid-19th century and published in Russian under the title: Candid Narratives of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father. Its author is unknown, its exact date uncertain. It made its first appearance in manuscript form in the hands of one of the famed monks of Mount Athos. The abbot of St. Michael's Monastery at Kazan, Russia, discovered it, copied it, and it appeared in 1884. Though one of the classics of Russian Orthodoxy that sounds a note often heard in Tolstoy...
...Porter's Noon Wine, the madness and death of a farmhand and the suicide of a farmer in horse-and-buggy Texas; in Gogol's The Overcoat, the acquisition and loss of an overcoat by a clerk somewhere in pre-revolutionary Russia; in Wescott's The Pilgrim Hawk, the liberation and recovery of a hunting falcon in the garden of an expatriate lady somewhere in France; and in Faulkner's The Bear, the pursuit of an unusually large bear in the boondocks of post-bellum Mississippi...
Watching the busy calisthenics of the Moslems at prayer, Asad once asked an old Mecca pilgrim the reason for all the physical activity. "How else then should we worship God?" he replied. "Did He not create both soul and body together? And this being so, should not man pray with his body as well as with his soul...
...duties of the Moslem on a had (pilgrimage) is to walk seven times around the Kaaba, the great black cube in Mecca that is the center of Islam and the symbol of God's oneness. Pilgrim Asad "walked on and on, the minutes passed, all that had been small and bitter in my heart began to leave my heart. I became part of a circular stream-oh, was this the meaning of what we were doing: to become aware that one is part of a movement in an orbit? Was this, perhaps, all confusion...
Koestler has found out that in Britain the Reichstag fire trial has been safely over for 350 years (when the right man was convicted, name of Guy Fawkes). The pilgrim has been given to understand that inferiority complexes should be of more moderate size than cathedrals of -more on the lines of a semidetached villa which may have terra-cotta griffons on the roof but no real monsters within. It is a "cosy" doghouse, Koestler admits, and in gratitude affirms that this mild race lives "closer to the text of the invisible writing than any other." No one in Koestler...