Meetings with remarkable stoats

Meetings with Remarkable Men by G. I. Gurdjieff is, as wiki delicately puts it, "autobiographical in nature"¹; the overview section there is good (arch), so I won't repeat it.

When I first read this I was about 25 and I found it impressive; now with the weight of years upon me I find on re-reading it that it is much less so. At best, it is an interesting tale, quite likely largely informed by truth, of life around 1900 in central Asia, Egypt, and various places around then on the fringes of empires. At worst, it presents vague semi-mystical ideas as reality.

I think that when G's ideas first appeared, around the 1920's, they made an impression; but like my own re-reading those impressions haven't aged well.

To impose my own interpretation: G grew up a bright young man in a dying empire and frequently found himself, as something of a young chancer, able to make his way on his wits. Vignette: he opens a repair shop and the local Turkish army sends in its typewriters, which have mysteriously stopped working. Of course, the spool ribbons have come to their end and simply need re-winding, which the dull-witted army is unable to think of. G instantly sees this, but nonetheless keeps the machines for days, in order to justify a high fee. Faced with situations like this he inevitably sees himself as above the common run of humanity, and ends up largely inventing / recycling an esotetic philosophy to skim over this; but really, he's just sharp-witted and the philosophy is vacuous.

The only piece of it worth keeping is more an observation of human nature than philosophy: that most people spend much of their lives effectively asleep.

He keeps on journeying to mysterious isolated monasteries in search of the Truth. Here's an example of the kind of thing he was journeying in search of: the young pupils stand for hours before the apparatuses, regulated in this way, and learn to sense and remember this posture. Many years pass before these young future priestesses are allowed to dance in the temple, where only elderly and experienced priestesses may dance. Everyone in the monastery knows the alphabet of these postures and when, in the evening in the main hall of the temple, the priestesses perform the dances indicated for the ritual of that day, the brethren may read in these dances one or another truth which men have placed there thousands of years before. These dances correspond precisely to our books. Just as is now done on paper, so, once, certain information about long past events was recorded in dances and transmitted from century to century to people of subsequent generations. And these dances are called sacred. He is unimpressed with modern science; he is convinced that the antient peoples knew secrets that they recorded in pre-sand maps of Egypt, songs, or here encoded in the movements of dance for those-who-know to read. However all we get is his vague searching for these secrets; never the actual secrets themselves; because of course there are none. He is the sort of person who will think that a concept is more interesting if written in Sanskrit than in English.

On modern science, a thought: when I say "contemptuous of modern science" it would probably be better put as contemptuous of the people doing modern science, though I'm not sure he ever realises the distinction. They are dull, plodding folk - of course he never met any real scientists - who do not have his forceful personality; and he never realises that he knows nothing of science.

Notes

1. Or, to be more blunt: whilst written as an autobiography it contains, as well as truth, so much interpolation, invention, hazy memory and wishful thinking that it would be impossible to extract the bits that are actually true.