nightly vigils in the woods, while I listened to the weird laughter of the loons like the voices of women far away, and watched the Northern Lights flash in their strange majesty from the horizon to mid-heaven. Unhappiness was making my real life sink deeper. No boy, I am sure, sought for what he believed would prove the realities with more passionate intensity than I did. It is curious now to look back upon those grave experiments first taught me by my Hindu friend, who assured me that the way to rob emotions of their power was to refuse to identify one's "self" with them, this real "self" merely looking on as a spectator, apart, detached; and that the outer events of life had small importance, what mattered being solely one's inner attitude to them, one's interpretation of them....
From these hours spent alone with Nature, as also from the hours of music with Louis B---- I returned, at any rate, refreshed and invigorated to my loathsome bars. Personal troubles seemed less important, less oppressive; they were, after all, but brief episodes in a single life; as Karma, they had to be faced, gone through with; they had something to teach, and I must learn the lesson, or else miss one of the objects of my being. Watching the starry heavens through hours of imaginative reflection brought a bigger perspective in which individual worries found reduced proportion. My thoughts introduced a yet vaster perspective still. The difficulty was to keep the point of view when the mood that encouraged it was gone. After a few hours in the House of Lords perspective was apt to dwindle again....
When the winter months made sleeping out impossible, and Louis B---- was not available, my precious hours of freedom would be spent with a young agnostic doctor dying of consumption; with the Professor of History in Toronto University--a sterling, sympathetic man, a true Christian of intellectual type, and a big, genuine soul who never thought of himself in the real help he gave me unfailingly with both hands; or, lastly, with an enthusiast
who shared my quest for what we called "the Realities."
