he is cruel, like a lion, like a savage, like a bandit, like a prime minister, like a little child.
I will quote you now a philosophic summary from the first of the books, "Ebony and Ivory":
Africa, like one of her own black-maned lions, laps up the life-blood of all the delicate illusions that have so long danced before the eyes of men and made them happy. Truth alone is left alive. What was suspected in Europe is made plain here: At the bottom of the well of life there is no hope. Under Scorpio, under the Southern Cross and in the clear light of this passionless, tropical sunshine, the hollow emptiness of the world's soul is made certain—the surface is everything, below is nothing.
But we have said all this, haven't we? some of us—among ourselves—privately, and then dismissed it as morbid, as a sick man's vision of life, as inconvenient, as not a respectable way of conceiving things and not respectful to the universe. We have said these things. We have half way known them. Something—merely beginning with the introspection of an invalid—has made Llewelyn Powys flamingly aware of them. And the curious fact is that, in consequence of a general increase in self-knowledge and, still more, in self-acknowledgment, among "civilized" people since the World War, there is hardly any one to be found, no matter how sound his lung cavity happens to be, who will stand up and dispute the truth of them. Unless neomysticism has more for us than yet meets the eye it looks as if the reconstruction of our personal philosophies would have to begin there—about where Mr. Powys stands.
