Voices in the Dark
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Weaving together the oppression and fear of the Nazi Occupation of Paris with the transcripts of thirty-one of G. I. Gurdjieff's wartime meetings, Voices in the Dark brings to pulsating life a heretofore unknown period in Gurdjieff's life. For his students, simply attending meetings took courage and often cunning, for Nazi checkpoints and informers were everywhere. Daily living was a test of one's mettle and ingenuity. Fuel was scarce, electricity sporadic, and food shortages soon caused the pigeon and cat populations of Paris to vanish. Through it all, with Mme Jeanne de Salzmann at his side, Gurdjieff held regular meetings and helped his students with money, food and hiding places to alleviate the growing terror. To give a sense of life under the Occupation, the voices that helped to mold the time speak out—Camus, Malraux, Sartre, Beauvoir, Gide, Daumal, Celine, Brasillach, De Gaulle, Churchill, Hitler, Stalin and many others. Explored in depth is the little-recognized but powerful influence of the pseudo-occult in the ideology of the New European Order that was the foundation of Hitler's vision. As Gurdjieff warned many years before: "There are two lines known in Europe, namely theosophy and so-called Western occultism, which have resulted from a mixture of the fundamental lines. Both lines bear in themselves grains of truth, but neither of them possesses full knowledge and therefore attempts to bring them to practical realization give only negative results."
"Few spiritual figures have inspired as much controversy as G. I. Gurdjieff
(1866–1949), the Greek-Armenian mystic who has been called the Father
of the New Age. In this unusual volume, Patterson, who has written about
Gurdjieff and his students before (most recently in Ladies of the Rope),
presents a striking picture of Nazi-occupied Paris, juxtaposing an informed
and sensitive history of those caught in the city with q&a transcripts
of the meetings Gurdjieff held with his followers at his city apartment.
The book's epilogue carries a quote by Gurdjieff that highlights his uniqueness:
'I not interested in who wins war. Not have patriotism or big ideals about
peace. Americans, with ideals, kill millions of Germans, Germans kill-with
own ideals—English, French, Russian, Belgian—all have ideals, all have
peaceful purpose, all kill.' These words may horrify many, yet this same
man, Patterson makes clear, arranged to have Jews hidden and fed the destitute
during the war years. The history Patterson presents of the events leading
to the Nazi invasion of subsequent complicity and of resistance gives
a vivid sense of a world rent by madness. By contrast, the extensive transcripts
depict a world ruled by reason, as Gurdjieff's followers struggle toward
self-knowledge under his guidance: surely a living metaphor for Gurdjieff's
message of a true Self hidden within the turbulent self of everyday suffering,
and an active explanation for the seeming dissonance between Gurdjieff's
actions and his expressed indifference about who might win the war. This
book succeeds on several levels. Its primary appeal, of course, will be
to those who relish yet more words from Gurdjieff; however, anyone curious
about Paris during WWII, and more broadly about the psychology of those
under extreme pressure, will find it of great interest."
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