Resources » KM Today Blog » 22 October 1922
22 October 1922
La Prieuré, Fontainebleau, Avon
I don't know whether Mr Gurdjieff will let me stay. I am ‘under observation' for a fortnight first. But if he does lll stay here for the time I should have been abroad, and get really cured - not half cured, not cured in my body only and all the rest still as ill as ever. I have a most lovely sumptuous room a kind of glorified Garsington for the fortnight. As for the food it is like a Gogol feast. Cream, butter - But what nonsense to talk about the food. Still its very important, and I want you to know that one is terribly well looked after, in every way. There are three doctors here, real ones. But these too seem details. The chief thing is that this is my Selsfield for the time, the house of my dreams. If Mr Gurdjieff wont let me stay I shall go to the South, take a little villa and try and learn to live on my own, growing things and looking after rabbits and so on, getting into touch with Life again. No treatment on earth is any good to me, really. Its all pretence. Manoukhine did make me heavier and a little stronger. But that was all if I really face the facts. The miracle never came near happening. It couldn't, Boge. And as for my spirit - well, as a result of that life at the Victoria Palace I stopped being a writer. I have only written long or short scraps since ‘The Fly'. If I had gone on with my old life I never would have written again, for I was dying of poverty of life. [To J. M. Murry, 21 October 1922.]