By Lida Prypchan
I was taken to the house of a wise man. The first thing I saw besides him was a large, beautiful drawing-room in shadows.
The introductions over, some time passed and we began to talk about the Cabala, Papus and the Tarot, numerology, his experience with the Knights of the Round Table, the relationship between Gengis Khan and the I Ching, his incredible dream of an infinite chess game and something very special: the book of magic spells (the Old Grimoire), where there is a formula “To make us fall madly in love with a person and maintain the effect indefinitely.”
I noticed that he didn’t talk about himself. Neither did he talk too much, but… his black eyes spoke to me. Days later, turning his eloquent eyes upon me, he said: “The fact is that you live fantasies and write realities… it should be the other way around: write fantasies and live realities. That way you’d be a little happier, without so many thoughts in your head, so many whys and wherefores. To achieve that, you have to learn to think differently in some cases, less in others and quite often not think at all. You have a tendency to squander words! Be quiet, silent, don’t give your opinion if you’re asked for it – let silence, the origin of all things, show you the way.”
Since then, I occasionally think about his words. It was the truth – but that wasn’t the problem. I admire those beings that sometimes can be mad and other times sane. I pity those who have, as I do, a third state – a mixture of prudence and craziness, logic and fantasy, or, what amounts to the same thing, an ambivalent, contradictory phenomenon, a pitched battle between my daydreams and my rawest reality. Or, as Clemente Freites (a lucky businessman who gave up everything to devote himself to the sea – and ended up a millionaire) used to say, “Living is a struggle between madness and dementia.”
The Cabala’s prediction to people such as this was as follows: “There is an old saying that you are ‘prophets in a foreign land’, which means that you excel in guiding other people’s activities, but are undependable when it comes to dealing with your own. Hence, you can expect a reputation for the good you do to others, and another for the misfortune you cause yourselves. There is one extremely important word in your lives, which can become your greatest asset, complementing what you already have, purging what is extraneous and substituting what you lack. That word is FORESIGHT. By incorporating it into your daily lives, you can make difficult things easy, turn pain into pleasure…”
