On top of all this paternal interference, you say my mother has written lachrymosely to you. Of course you can see that what meager sense senility has left in Grandma's brain the sun and saltwater have quite vaporized. I do believe she has goaded your Uncle Jeremy into writing me a somewhat harassing letter as well. What do you all object to? I know the answer: my attempting to become anything other than your (plural) obedient servant and flattering social extension. Perish the thought that I and my shoeless friends" would for a moment cause a frown to cross the stately brow of the beer count where he sits enthroned amid his mighty vats of boiling mash! Not to mention his fat Katrinka of a countess and their wispy dilettantish son, who led you to waste a whole glorious English summer, the kind that Browning wrote about, on dreary flat soggy Holland-forgive me, I just get frantic fearing that Jan won't let you grow-that you'll allow him to put a permanent cramp in the ongoing splendid adventure of your womanhood just as your father with the connivance of my parents did to me twenty-two years ago.
Do forgive me. How your mother does go on with her "wiggles"! Think of these letters as what I do now instead of embroidery. But isn't it better not to pretend I wasn't hurt by the really very delicately but unmistakably challenging tone of your letter? I've been under some stress here, too, aside from worrying about my priceless elf-child. Pressures from the outside are producing shifting allegiances within. It turns out that Ma Prapti, a rather stern sad mustachioed soul whom I formerly admired, as a kind of Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa, has really been rather indiscriminate in her distribution of prescription drugs. Vikshipta left, it turns out, because he was convinced he was being poisoned, I was recently told (by Yajna, the boy about your age I playfully offered you but who for the moment seems to be involved with Satya and Nagga and their crowd of PR glamour girls, who really could be professional football cheerleaders from the uniform glossy look of them). There are days, especially after the cafeteria has served one of those cruelly hot curries that disguise every other taste, when people complain of wooziness and cramps and we all go about in something of a date-I've been blaming it on the heat, which even though we're almost into September has not let up. There is so much suspicion around in fact that I don't like to mail personal letters with the Uma Room mail but I must get this on the way and do hope it will still reach you at the Iffley Road address. If not, they can forward it back to Yale, which begins in less than three weeks! I will ignore your passing mention of Jan's wanting you to take the fall term off so you and he can go to Crete and the Greek islands in the familial yacht. I know taking time off from college isn't the end of the world like it used to be but skipping out of your senior fall term for a Mediterranean jaunt with a Dutch playboy would be-how can I say this without giving offense?-unspeakable.
Still love me? Here's some kisses:
XXX
Mummy
Gentlemen:
Enclosed find endorsed checks totalling $66,403.27 for deposit to my account, #0002743-911.
Thank you sincerely,
Sarah P. Worth
Gentlemen:
I am very interested in opening a credit-deferrable charge account with the Arhat Book and Gift Shop of Samana Cay. My understanding is that a balance in excess of charges will accumulate 6% interest compounded monthly, while a debit of more than thirty days' standing will be penalized at the rate of 12%, also compounded monthly. Though I am temporarily an executive assistant at Ashram Arhat here in Arizona, my account, I wish to emphasize, would be a personal one, for my use only. I look forward to receiving whatever information you can send, mailed to me in care of this motel, along with relevant currency and investment regulations in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas.
With sincere thanks,
Sarah P. Worth
le deux septembre 1986
Monsieur,
Je voudrais ouvrir, peut-être, avec Crédit Suisse un compte identifié seulement par son numéro, un numéro qui soit secret. Envoyez-moi, s'il vous plait, à l’adresse cidessous, les formules necessaires et les règles qu'il faut qu'on observe concernant un tel compte.
Agréez, je vous prie,
l'expression de mes sentiments distingues,
Sarah P. Worth (Madame)
Sep. 2
Dear Dr. Podhoretz-
I'm afraid an October appointment won't do either. Tell your secretary to put me in the inactive file. I'm still flossing, though. Do you think an occasional twinge in the left eyetooth means anything, or is it just the enamel wearing thin with old age? I notice it most with iced tea, though very hot curries set it off too.
Warm regards,
Sarah Worth
Dear Martin-
Well, I'm enchanted that my little postcard meant so much to you. Your generous response-longer, I fear, than I can answer in detail-was waiting for me here at the motel. I don't live here, I live forty miles away with a lot of other people seeking the inner peace that comes with the good life. When I wrote you that all the material world is a jail I did not mean to make light of your predicament or the terrible conditions of incarceration in Massachusetts but to offer a consoling general premise-that for any of us to be alive is to suffer pain and limitation. We are born into a certain body, with a certain sex and color of skin, etc., at a specific time and place, of parents who shelter us and damage us according to their capacities, and as we grow we attain a certain height and degree of intelligence we can't do" much about, and fall into some job or r6le-in your case, into drugs and burglary-and from a certain angle one could become intensely claustrophobic about all these circumstances, which are more constricting and harder to escape from than any cell. And then the body and with it the brain begin to age and malfunction and eventually to die and the constriction is very tight indeed. But there is a way out, the way of the spirit, of accepting that little unchanging viewpoint or "I" inside you as part of a larger spiritual reality, which we call purusba, in relation to which material reality with all its confining specifics is mere illusion, called maya, which also means deception. And there are exercises and disciplines which enable men called masters (gurus) to attain release (moksba) from the material world and the bliss of pure spiritual being, nirvana, which doesn't literally mean nothingness but "no wind"-we will get out of the wind, Martin, and exist in a place where everything is still and shining and eternal. The orthodox path to nirvana is long and tedious (you begin by thinking of a point just behind your forehead, at the bridge of your nose) but it is not the only way, there are shortcuts that suddenly open to people-even and perhaps especially to foolish and miserable people-and there is no reason why at least the beginning of enlightenment-a little fascinating pinprick-won't come to you in jail just as one came to me in my nice suburban home (which in moments of weakness I still miss). But you must look within for what is real. You tried to look within with drugs but what they gave you was not real, they just suppressed part of maya. There is a better way out, which does not lead to jail and early death. This Way embraces everything: it is the Way of striving and surrender, of action and inaction, of good and bad, of the senses and their absence. Whatever name you give this Way, whatever images you use to help you visualize the Path, it is the Way that we all seek and that makes all our seeking one.