[Rarebooks] FS: J. C. Powys Important MANUSCRIPT on Spirituality

[Charles Agvent]

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POWYS, John Cowper. AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT SIGNED (AMS). Holograph 
MANUSCRIPT, 23 pages written on rectos of separate 8-1/2" x 11" sheets, 
SIGNED in the byline. Complete draft of his essay titled "Detachment," 
with numerous additions and deletions throughout, and with a holograph 
note at upper right of the first page: "Published in 'The Aryan Path' 
(for the Bombay Editors)." Powys begins his important essay on 
spirituality: "Real Detachment begins when we think of our soul as a 
wayfarer from a far-off country, lodged for a while, 'hospes comesque 
corporis,' guest and companion of the body," among the tribes of men and 
upon this satellite of the voyaging sun." He concludes: "It is in 
relation to individual human beings that Detachment is most necessary of 
all. The wise man spends his life running away. But luckily he can run 
away without moving a step. We are all -- men and women alike -- teased 
by the blue-bottle flies who want to lay their eggs. These are the 
people who have never learnt and never could learn the art of 
detachment. They are blue-bottle flies -- as my sister Phillipa says -- 
and they want to lay their eggs; and they can only lay their eggs in 
carrion. Not one of us but has carrion in him, carrion in her; and the 
buzzing blue-bottles, among our fellows, smell this afar off, and fly 
towards it, and would fain settle upon it and lay their eggs. Here 
indeed, here most of all is it necessary to exercise the very magic of 
Detachment, that magic that makes it possible for you to be in one place 
-- like the man seated on the naked stone by the flowing water -- and 
yet to be in the heart of the flaming sun and at the circumference of 
the divine ether. For if you fail to exercise the magic of detachment 
upon the blue-bottle flies who infest your road they will really lay 
their eggs -- the eggs of the maggots of civilisation -- in your soul. 
And then you will believe in the justifiability of vivisection; in the 
sacrosanct importance of private property; in the virtue of patriotic 
war; in slaughter-houses, in brothels, in slavery, and in the great, 
noble, scientific, gregarious, loving, human, undetached art of -- 
Advertisement. Rousseau was right. It is only by detaching yourself from 
human civilisation that you can live a life worthy of a living soul." 
The blue-bottle fly is Powys's symbol for those who have not succeeded 
in becoming detached, those who cannot find fulfillment in detachment, 
in solitude. He not only used it in this essay but in at least one of 
his novels, WOLF SOLENT. Paperclip staining at upper edge of first and 
terminal pages, occasional small tear or chip. Near Fine.

"The Magic of Detachment" appeared in the October 1933 issue of THE 
ARYAN PATH. (#020097)        $3,500

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