‘Have you any food you don’t want?’ The question brought me back to myself. ‘Because I could take it with me. I eat very lightly when I am travelling.’ Together we examined the fridge. He took a lascivious sip of milk to see if it had turned or not. No! Could he take it with him? He reverently poured it into his little hot-water bottle. There were a couple of apples, a small fragment of cheese and a couple of biscuits and a tomato. I calculated that it would just about have kept a mouse alive for a night or so. ‘This will last me three days at least,’ said Chang running his eye over the assembled items. I pictured him in the wastes of Cambridge nibbling at this fare and blowing on his fingers for warmth; but like all good yoga men he hardly felt the cold. ‘I shall be all right.’ I had intended to take him to a station myself but at the last moment I had a notification for a long-distance telephone call which I could not countermand. So I called the village taxi which came scratching and scrawling into the drive on all the loose gravel. ‘Well,’ he said, giving me the benefit of a final Taoist look accompanied by a smile of friendly complicity. ‘Thank you for the whole trip. It’s been a memorable meeting, no?’ Indeed it had, and I felt so despondent at the sight of him leaving that I quite forgot to give him a farewell Chortle. He strung his belongings around him and donned his light overcoat and the ski bonnet of soft wool. ‘We’ll meet again in London,’ he said, and I agreed. Then the taxi bore him off into the night while I stood in the garden for a while, thinking of his book and listening to the whistle of the owls as they came whirring down in search of field-mice or bats.
So ended my first Taoist visitation, and as the spring wore on to summer I began to be increasingly taken up with other problems of the ordinary kind. But from time to time I received a call from Jolan Chang to report progress on the book. He had found some delightful and appropriate illustrations, the preface and postface were excellent, and so on. I contributed a note for the sleeve, but I promised more substantial help later on which, by a series of trifling mishaps, I was unable to supply at the right time. But the book appeared and did well, receiving a serious if slightly reserved English press. In France, however, its critics were more enthusiastic and its public, for the most part young, very enthusiastic. Apparently it made sense, even to people habitually subjected to the fraudulent cat’s cradle of the dialectic or to the hiccups of Tel Quel! But it was too simple and unpretentious a book to get up powerful tensions of an intellectual kind. In fact, one would have to have an inkling of the value of breath to be struck by it, I suppose; or to have taken soundings already and come to some conclusions about the meaning of silence … But at all events the little bookshop which abuts the old Sorbonne told me that it was much in demand. Chang went back to his great flat and his collection — not to mention his tiny gnome of a daughter — and our correspondence lapsed; I had several journeys ahead of me. But I was sorry to have failed him at the London end. Happily the support of Joseph Needham had given the book the prestige it needed for its launching.
4
The desultory autumn set in — the economy of France had begun to founder with the resulting labour troubles due to the high cost of petrol. The Arabs had overturned the apple cart of our economy and there would be no way back to prosperity and full employment in my lifetime. Well, what did it matter after sixty? In Paris, sauntering the quais, I came upon a Collected Oscar Wilde and to my astonishment saw it in a review of the Tao Te Ching by his hand; paradoxically enough it had been written for a ladies’ fashion magazine of which he had once been editor. It was, if my memory serves me right, a review of the first London translation, by Giles. And Wilde’s sympathetic little notice suggested that he had thoroughly understood the doctrines of the old sage. It must have dated from his more impecunious period when he was forced to turn to journalism to make ends meet. (He wasn’t the only one. Mallarmé among other great poets was also forced once to edit a fashion magazine for the same reasons.)
I returned south. Came the harvest, the bullfighting, the wine, followed by the morose period of storms and mists which heralded a premature winter. It was to be hard, according to the weather forecasts. So it proved to be. Once more I spent it alone with the owls — they uttered no complaints. There must have been plenty of stranded mice and bats in the old park with its tall trees. I was trying to write two books at once, and it wasn’t the sort of thing one should try. Then came a summons from the Tibetans to share their New Year celebrations in early February. I had followed with interest the fortunes of this little monastery whose existence (now in financial danger) was due to the sudden influx of refugees after the fall of Tibet.4 It was certainly the most interesting and forceful centre of Buddhism in France and the old chateau which had been made over to the order was ideally situated (by its remoteness among rather melancholy woods, not far from Autun) to the introspective studies and retreats and initiations which the Tibetan lamas promised a virgin audience of students. I had never so far been able to go — my travels had always drawn me out of France during the period when the Abbey was in full activity. But the link was firm — after all, the Kagu Ling clan had descended directly — by word of mouth, by breath to breath, by bouche a la bouche, of initiation — from the national poet of Tibet, Mila Repa, whose poems and teachings I had known since I was sixteen, and which summoned up for me at once the strange life I had lived in Darjiling, with its scripture classes, its Sunday School excursions to Tiger Hill (no tigers now!). Then, too, my father was curious and adventurous, and during the period while he looked after the tiny railway (Siliguri-Darjiling) he took us on many excursions, rides and walks in the wide Teesta valley. Once he went as far as Kalimpong, and often we were visitors to Buddhist monasteries when they were en fête. But from that early epoch onwards I had had no direct contact with things Tibetan. The little pamphlet came at a time when I was much in need of it — for my personal affairs were in disorder and I was plagued by a dozen different nagging contingencies. In spite of the weather — the whole of France was under snow and the long tally of snow damage and flood catastrophe completely filled the news bulletins — I decided to motor up in my little camping-car, hoping that if I went cautiously I could avoid trouble and arrive safely at my destination.