A Hermit in the Himalayas by Paul Brunton

Author:Paul Brunton [Brunton, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473527829
Amazon: B01MSRA3J2
Barnesnoble: B01MSRA3J2
Goodreads: 33154440
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2018-01-14T06:00:00+00:00

fn1 The Tehri State Medical Officer, Dr. D. N. Nautyal, M.B., B.S., examined Swami Jnanananda after his return and found that his pulse-beat is now permanently set about thirty degrees below normal, I am informed by a State official.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

On Philosophy and Fun—Reflections on Mr. Charles Chaplin—His Silent Art and Genius—The Necessity of Modernizing Yoga—The Inadvisability of Asceticism—Some Truths about Sex and Yoga.

IF ONE OF my more serious friends were to intrude during this period of my Himalayan hermitage and enter my room, he might lift more than one eyebrow in surprise at a certain object which hangs upon the buff-distempered wall above the mantelshelf. He might take the thing as an outward and visible sign, not of grace, oh no! but of the inevitable degeneration which sets in when people live without healthy active contact with society. He might even suggest that I am prematurely entering into an early dotage. And he might turn his highbrow head aside with a pronounced sniff of contempt.

The object which would cause such supercilious conduct is, I am almost ashamed to confess, a portrait of a certain film comedian, one Charlie Chaplin, and nothing more. The picture is no full-length artistic figure painted in fresh-looking oil-colours and framed in richly scrolled gilt wood. No, it is just a common print, a line drawing impressed in cheap ink on ordinary grey newsprint paper. It is, in fact, I am again almost ashamed to confess, merely a scrap torn the other week from an advertisement of a cinema theatre.

Not that there are any cinema theatres built on the steep slopes of my Himalayan domain (I wish there were!) In the whole of Tehri-Garhwal State, as in the tiny European countries of Lichtenstein and San Marino, no pictorial shadows flicker out the tragedies and passions and comedies of human existence upon white screens; no audience gathers in the twentieth-century temple of worship to do reverence to blonde Hollywood heroines and their romantic self-assured heroes; and no mountain goatherd pays his hard-earned annas to hear that incredible magic of the West, the talkies.

But a friend who labours editorially on a certain newspaper takes pity on my fancied loneliness and sends me a supply of his journals through the post. Although always a little out of date with their news, through the exigencies of a postal service that must climb up and down the narrow mountain trails of Himalaya, these reminders of the existence of an outside world are always welcome. And it is to one of these papers that I am deeply indebted for this frameless portrait of the unique, the inimitable, the naïvely charming yet ever-pathetic figure of Charlie.

It is true that the scrap of paper is neighboured by more dignified pictures, but that is no excuse for its own existence. For on its right there is a magazine photo of a wonderful cloud scene, while on its left hangs a real photograph of white-mantled Mount Kailas, which was given me by Yogi Pranavananda when our projected pilgrimage together was frustrated.

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