There was a very heavy frost and the milky light offered no promise of sun. Moreover trouble lay ahead for me — engine trouble. In cleaning up my little car, scraping off the ice and checking the heater, I realized that a vital part had worked loose and would have to be replaced or the thread would bite off. It was most vexatious; but if I left her there to freeze away to death I might have to wait for spring before I could move her! And the old chateau was miles from Autun where I might presume upon a technical sophistication to supply the missing part. I thought then that towards evening I would limp back along the road to Autun in the hope of mending the breech. It gave me the day for contacts and studies, and I used it to the full. The library was good and much in demand. There were a number of good lectures listed and almost continuous Tibetan classes with professors of whose proficiency one could have no doubt. The whole thing was organized effortlessly and well and clearly there was some master-brain behind the enterprise. But by late afternoon I felt it wiser to take advantage of the light and stalk back in all precariousness to Autun. This I did, and arrived only to find everything closed against the approaching weekend and the only decent garage in the place out of spares. They would have to be sent down from Paris, which would take a night; but with the coming strike on the railways … So went my Tibetan New Year. A draughty night in a cold hotel in Autun did nothing to assuage my irritation. Yet, in another sense, I felt that I had seen what I had come to see — the functioning of the abbey and the general state of instruction prevailing in it. The thing was serious. Tibet was here to stay, so to speak. I wondered if perhaps instead of going back to Kagu Ling as I had intended I should not head away down south; the weather reports were so uncompromisingly gloomy that my concern was pardonable. Snow, ice, floods … The spare did not arrive till late on Monday, and the car was not put right until Tuesday morn — by now the Tibetan dignitaries would have taken to the air like swans, heading back to India where the founder seminaries were situated. Yes, I would sneak home.
The autoroute was lashed with wind and rain, and the traffic on it — many heavy trailers, few private cars — set up chains of spray as if they had been heavy motor boats in a choppy sea. One good souse from their back wheels and one had to slow down and set the wipers to work at speed. And the wind swung me about like a pendulum. It was really hard and disagreeable driving and I felt half dead with fatigue. I thought I would climb off the autoroute and down into a valley but I did not want to land myself in a flood area so I waited until I saw the turn-off for Orange signalled; this part of the land I knew well, and it is rarely flooded. So it proved to be, and I felt I might manage to rest my weary limbs in Avignon for a night before rolling back home across the garrigues. I knew that the Rhone was danger-high but had not jumped its banks as yet, and when I crossed it despite the flailing wind and rain (not to mention the invisible mountain snows melting into its sources and tributaries) it had not yet swallowed the islands, while the new bridge rode high and clear into town. But the town itself was sodden as a wet mattress, spectral, winter-locked. I don’t know what put the Vaucluse fountain into my mind — but yes, I do. I saw an advertisement for some article of domestic ware called Vega — and my thoughts turned to a girl I had known under that starry name. The star on the advertisement reminded me of the intense bright blue — almost sapphire — of her eyes. Vega, pole star of the ancients, had always been my favourite fixed star. How often have I lain on the deck of a caique or a liner in the Aegean watching that marvellous gem-like stare, unwinking, unmoving, all-seeing. The girl had some of this in her own steady regard — the uncompromising brightness of a cat’s eyes, a Persian kitten, say. When she was interested in something or someone she sat so still that she didn’t seem to be breathing, she could have been dead, fixing you with these ‘blue lamps of heaven’ — let us indulge her memory with a seventeenth-century conceit from Darley. But here in Avignon on that rainy afternoon I suddenly thought of her and wondered if I should not lay that night in the little hotel we knew once by the roaring waters of Petrarchian Vaucluse. She too had been a Taoist with the requisite look of melting mischief as required by the recipe of Chang. I had first come under this disquieting gaze in Geneva. A little group of psychiatrists — all Jungians — had asked if they could meet me and ask a few questions. I think they were just curious to size me up and see if I was quite right in the head. It was not the first time that such a thing had come about. They were friends of other friends, and so I agreed and we met in the rather pleasant brasserie and beer-hall — a chop-house, really — called Bovard which should have been ‘classé’ and which has now been swept away and turned into a bank. Anyway in the background there sat Vega staring at me — looking right through me, as if she could count all the small change in my pocket. And the conversation was lively and full of pith. I gathered that she was the wife or mistress of one of the doctors present though I could not decide which one. Nevertheless, the evening came to an end and off we all went home. A fortnight later I ran into her in Bounyon where I was trying to buy a cheese called Vacherin. I had forgotten her, actually, and she had to jog my memory by references to this pleasant but unmemorable evening. We went to have a coffee together and it was here in a shady cafeé that I started to get to know Vega. To cut a long story short in the midst of a thousand trivia she said that she was a real old-fashioned reader. Every year she chose one author and read everything about him. She added that this year the lucky author was Nietzsche and she was in mid-channel. Why did this remark make an instant impression on me? Because I myself had been doing more or less the same sort of thing — an echo of it, so to speak. I had been collecting and sifting information about Lou Andrée Salome with the vague notion of writing an essay on this remarkable and gifted enchantress, who as a young girl bewitched Nietzsche, then had a child by Rilke and ended up in old age as Freud’s most deeply cherished pupil and friend. How extraordinary that none of her many books, including the capital essays on Nietzsche and Rilke, were available in English! Actually my project was hopeless, I knew, because of my lack of German. Nevertheless this strange frieze of characters gave me food for thought; I had planned to press the story of their lives forward as far as the lake of Orta, which I was then proposing to visit. It was here that the thirty-year-old philosopher proposed to the eighteen-year-old girl, it was here that he outlined the whole scenario of Zarathustra! Once one has read of the notebooks in which they played question-and-answer games and riddles based on philosophic questions it seems quite possible that passages of the great classic could actually have been written by her. The idea, however far-fetched, intrigued me. And with this end in mind I obtained a commission from an American paper to write a vignette on the Borromean Islands which lay hard by on the the larger lake, Maggiori. ‘How odd!’ I said, and she echoed me, ‘Why odd?’ I said that I was doing the same sort of thing and added, ‘I am going down to Orta next Sunday for a week. I want to see the little lake where they were so happy when they were young. I have some notions about her making a contribution to Zarathustra — which I shall never be able to check because I have no German.’