Chapter 20Undated 1956

the suffering of mankind. If he exists, why doesn’t he give men the strength to break out of this ‘Magic Circle’ in which they keep turning like prisoners in a cell. Twelve years ago, when I was twenty, I was turning in circles in a prison cell in Bordeaux,21 awaiting some execution or other – but I am still this same prisoner. If I have advanced during these twelve years, it is in despair, in misery. All this is outrageous, scandalous, should the divine exist.

Leave the Ashram? – But the rest of the world is just as absurd. It is man who is absurd, and god – if he exists – is a pure disgrace. Mother, I am SCANDALIZED, and I feel within me the rebellion and despair of all men who surely have not deserved all this.

Signed: Bernard

(Letter to Mother from Satprem)

Pondicherry Sweet Mother, with all the sincerity of which I am capable, I am putting before you an important problem (important to me) so that you may help me resolve it. I feel that I am coming to a decisive turning point, but something is preventing me from going any further.

All my past is weighing down on me, not because of any attachments, for I regret NOTHING of my past and my only hope is what lies before me. Yet I have not entirely undergone all this like a marionette, it even seems to me that ‘I’ have created it, composed it like a book – for the last fifteen years, from the time of the concentration camps, I have consciously multiplied my experiences and have passed through a whole range of rebellions and situations in order to gather the basic material for a book. As it happens, this formulation of ‘my’ book gradually merged with the search for my real Self. Now I know what I was seeking, but this book has grown with me, it is there like a powerful formation weighing down on me, and it weighs on me all the more now, for since my contact with Sri Aurobindo all my past experiences seem charged with meaning and symbolism. I find your hand in it everywhere, and I can now connect all the apparent coincidences and sift out an extraordinary necessity that has led me here; all this makes a dense, living, vibrant book that weighs on me. I need to cast it all out, to free myself, to write this book.

Not only do I need to liquidate this past, but also to renew my choice, to strengthen my presence here – and I feel this book as a commitment, it will help me set my route in a decisive way. It is a test.

21Satprem was arrested by the Gestapo in Bordeaux in 1943 for resisting the German occupation. He was later sent to