Below, Conrad Aiken writes to friend Maurice Firuski (the proprietor of a Cambridge, MA bookshop), advising him on how to “escape the worst moment’s of one’s crucifixion.”
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TO MAURICE FIRUSKI
November 9, 1921, London
Dear Maurice:
I was delighted to hear from you—even in so melancholy a strain. I think the thing to remember in these situations, if one has any capacity left for “remembering,” is that one can always escape the worst moments of one’s crucifixion by suddenly taking a detached view of the cross, the crucifiers, and the singular pains in one’s hands and feet. If one can be amused by the whole spectacle, so much the better. Laugh, and you will be healed. Try laughing three times a day. Rock back and forth in the subway (Harvard Central Kendall Park) observing the extraordinary fish who sit opposite you: have a vision of all these idiot mouths simultaneously opening to receive food: observe how, as food enters the mouths, light dies out of the eyes, and after that take seriously an human affliction if you can. Would you believe it? I have had trials, crucifixions myself—bewilderments of pain, outrageous dislocations of the soul, and one of them, not a trifle, since I saw you. But I’m becoming a very Buddha of callousness—I smile at my navel (I’m not so fat but what it has to be done in a mirror) and thumb my nose at heart, soul and pride. Let things go! They were never anything but a nuisance.
Very little news here. “Punch” is out—a nice looking book Secker has made of it, too. Forslin and Nocturne follow in January. I’ve seen Fletcher, Freeman, Shanks, Bosschere—We’ve taken a flat, and of all the refrigerating plants I’ve ever lived in, it’s the best. My teeth chatter, my hands are blue, I have to melt the ink drop by drop to write to you.—I told Shanks to mention the “Journal” to Virginia Woolf. (It is reported that she goes cuckoo everyone in a while and moos like a cow. Woolf, cuckoo, cow!)
Yrs.
C A
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