with him, as far as I was able to see the point) that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge. Dr. Suzuki says somewhere that to be in a state of pure consciousness--satori--is to be with God before he said, Let there be light. Seymour and I thought it might be a good thing to hold back this light from you and Franny (at least as far as we were able), and all the many lower, more fashionable lighting effects--the arts, sciences, classics, languages--till you were both able at least to conceive of a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light. We thought it would be wonderfully constructive to at least (that is, if our own "limitations" got in the way) tell you as much as we knew about the men--the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas--who knew something or everything about this state of being. That is, we wanted you both to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shan-karacharya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence. That, anyway, was the big idea. Along with all this, I suppose I'm trying to say that I know how bitterly you resent the years when S. and I were regularly conducting home seminars, and the metaphysical sittings in particular. I just hope that one day--preferably when we're both blind drunk--we can talk about it. (Meantime, I can only say that neither Seymour nor I ever had a notion, that far back, that you were going to grow up into an actor. We should have, no doubt, but we didn't. If we had, I feel certain S. would have tried to do something constructive about it. Surely somewhere there must be a special prep course for Nirvana and points East designed strictly for actors, and I think S. would have found it.) The paragraph should close, but I can't stop muttering. You'll wince at what comes next, but come it must. I think you know that I had the best intentions of checking in now and then after S.'s death to see how you and Franny were holding up. You were eighteen, and I didn't worry about you overly. Although I did hear from a gossipy little snip in one of my classes that you had a reputation in your college dorm for going off and sitting in meditation for ten hours at a time, and that made me think. But Franny was thirteen at the time. I simply couldn't move, though. I was afraid to come home. I wasn't afraid you'd both, in tears, take up a position across the room and fire the complete set of Max Mueller's Sacred Books of the East at me, one by one. (Which would have been masochistic ecstasy for me, probably.) But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me. As I remember very well, I let a whole year go by after the funeral before I came back to New York at all. After that, it was easy enough to come in for birthdays and holidays and be reasonably sure that questions would run to when my next book would be finished and had I done any skiing lately, etc. You've even both been up here on many a weekend in the last couple of years, and though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word. Today is the first time I've really wanted to speak up. The deeper I get into this goddam letter, the more I lose the courage of my convictions. But I swear to you that I had a perfectly communicable little vision of truth (lamb-chop division) this afternoon the very instant that child told me her boy friends' names were Bobby and Dorothy. Seymour once said to me--in a crosstown bus, of all places-- that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold. That
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