Imagery in Translation. free. So he bought a bit of wild land on a mountain-side, with a chestnut trees growing on it

free. So he bought a bit of wild land on a mountain-side, with a chestnut trees growing on it. He waited till spring; then went up started building himself a little cabin, with the stones from the 1 side. By summer, he had got himself a nice little hut with a chim and one little window, a table, a chair, a bed, and the smallest nurr of things a hermit may need. Then he considered himself set up i hermit.

His hermitage stood in a sheltered nook in the rocks of mountain, and through the open door he looked out on the big, st gering chestnut trees of the upper region. These trees, this bit of pr erty was his legal own, but he wanted to dedicate it to somebody God, preferably.

He felt, however, a bit vague about God. In his youth he i been sent to Sunday School, but he had long been through with that. He had, as a matter of fact, even forgotten the Lord's Pra; like the old man in the Tolstoy parable. If he tried to remember it. mixed it up with The Lord is my Shepherd, and felt annoyed, might, of course, have fetched himself a Bible. But he was throi with all that.

Because, before he was through with everything, he had г quite a lot about Brahma and Krishna and Shiva, and Buddha; Confucius and Mithras, not to mention Zeus and Aphrodite and t bunch, nor the Wotan family. So when he began to think: The Lor my Shepherd, somehow Shiva would start dancing a Charlestoi the back of his mind, and Mithras would take the bull by the hoi and Mohammed would start patting the buttery flanks of Ayes and Abraham would be sitting down to a good meal offa fat ram, the grease ran down his beard. So that it was very difficult to cone trate on God with a large 'g', and the hermit had a natural reluctai to go into refinements of the great I Am, or of thatness. He wante(get away from all that sort of things. For what else had he becom hermit?

But alas, he found it wasn't easy. If you're a hermit, you got to concentrate. You've got to sit in the door of your hut in

sunshine, and concentrate on something holy. This hermit would

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he door of his hut in the sunshine right enough, but he couldn't i anything holy enough really to keep him concentrated. If he d some nice eastern mode of meditation, he sat cross-legged with lint lotus-like smile on his face, some dog-in-the-manger inside i growled: Oh, cut it out, Henry, Nirvana's cold egg for the likes you.

So gradually the hermit became desperate. There he was, all ged up quite perfect as a holy man, a hermit, and an anchorite, and felt like an acrobat trying to hang on to a tight wire with his eye->ws. He simply had nothing to hold on to. There wasn't a single iiness or high-and-mightiness that interested him enough to bring icentration. And a hermit with nothing to concentrate on is like a in the cream jug.

Spring changed into summer. The primroses by the little stream lere the hermit dipped his water faded and were gone, only their ge leaves spread to the hotter days. The violets flickered to a fin-.; at last not a purple spark was left. The chestnut burrs upon the >und finally had melted away, the leaves overhead had emerged d overlapped one another, to make the green roof of summer.

And the hermit was bored, and rather, and rather angry with nself and everything else. He saw nobody up there: an occasional at-boy, an occasional hunter shooting little birds went by, looking cance. The hermit nodded a salutation, but no more.

Then at intervals he went down to the village for food. The lage was four long miles away, down the steep side of the moun-n. And when you got there, you found nothing but the silence, the t, the poverty and the suspicion of a mountain hamlet. And there is very little to buy.

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Это случилось не так уж давно. Почувствовал человек, о устал от жизни, и решил стать отшельником. Денег у него немного, и он знал, что в наши дни вряд ли можно снять

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