Confessions of Aleister Crowley

453 From early boyhood my imagination had been excited by accounts of the Great Fair at Nijni Novgorod. Finding "the time and the place and the {716} loved one all together", at the cost of a slight effort, I decided to trot off and see "The Fun of the Fair", by which title I called the poem in which I describe my excursion. The way in which I wrote it is, I imagine, unique in literature. I wrote down in heroic couplets every incident of the adventure exactly as it occurred and when it occurred. The only variation is that occasionally I permit myself to exaggerate the facts (as in enumerating the races of men whom I met) when the spirit of humour takes charge. This poem should have appeared in the English Review in the autumn of 1914. It was pushed out to make way for my "Appeal to the American Republic", reprinted from boyhood's happy days, with such politically necessary revisions as "the traitor Prussian" instead of "the traitor Russian". It has thus never yet seen the light. {717} 74 As I was sitting at lunch one day in the Hermitage beginning a lyrical ritual intended for the use of an individual in his private work, I found myself, in the middle of a sentence, at a loss for the next word. I have already explained how swiftly and spontaneously my spirit soars from stanza to stanza without need of previous reflection or subsequent revision. In all these weeks my pen had swung like a skater over the paper. Now suddenly it stopped; an eagle in full flight stricken by a shaft. That sentence has never been completed. The inspiration was withdrawn from me. My light had gone out like an arc-light when the cable is cut. It was long before I wrote again. Three days later, the contract at the Aquarium was due to expire; and those days proved to me how perfectly my existence depended on inspiration. The city, from a crashing chorus of magical music, a pageant of passionate pleasure, became a cold chaos of inanity. The bells no longer sang; the sun and moon were stagnant, soulless spectres in a senseless sky --- like a ghost on the gusts of the gale. I went from miraculous Moscow into a world of inarticulate impressions. St Petersburg failed to rekindle the wonder and worship which it had awakened in me of old. The Nevski Prospekt seemed narrower, meaner; a mere street. St Isaacs no longer enthralled me. I was able to compare the Neva with the Nile, the Ganges, the Rangoon River, and even the Rhine, as coldly and critically as Baedeker. My spirit need infinite repose after its incomparable effort, and this repose was granted to it by the voyage to Stockholm. There are ways amid the Western Isles of Scotland, through the Norwegian fjords, and sometimes upon tropic seas, which speak to the soul in a language unknown to any other scenes. There is a solemnity and a serenity in their continual silence which seem not of this world. But the summer voyage across the Baltic, amid the archipelago is sovereign above any of these. There is no single ripple on the sea, no stirring in the air; the night is indistinguishable from the day, for neither suffers interruption; the steamer skins the surface of the sea as swift and silent as a swallow. One cannot even hear the engines, so utterly does their rhythm interpenetrate the totality of experience. There is a sense of floating in fairyland. One forgets the land whence one has come; one has no vision of the coast to which one is speeding. It seems impossible that the journey even began, still less, that its end is appointed. One seems to flit between innumerable islands, some crowned with foliage, {718} some mere bare gray knolls, scarce peeping from the waveless mirror of water. There is a sense of infinite intricacy of intention as the steamer insinuates itself into one curving channel after another, or comes out suddenly from a labyrinth of lyrical islands into a shoreless silence. One's