Beelzebubs-Tales-to-His-Grandson-by-G-I-Gurdjieff

Adopting here this example of popular wisdom formed in the course ofcenturies and expressed by the image of a stick, which as was said has indeedtwo ends, one end considered good and the other bad, then if I take advantageof the mentioned automatism acquired by me through long practice, it will ofcourse be very good for me personally, but according to this saying, for thereader it will be just the opposite; and what the opposite of good is, evenevery nonpossessor of hemorrhoids can easily understand.In short, if I exercise my prerogative and take the good end of the stick, thebad end will inevitably fall "on the reader's head."This may indeed happen, for in Russian it is impossible to express the so tosay niceties of philosophical questions, which I intend to touch upon in mywritings rather fully; whereas, although it is possible to do so in Armenian,this language, to the misfortune of all contemporary Armenians, has nowbecome quite impractical for expressing contemporary notions.In order to assuage the bitterness of my inner hurt owing to this, I must saythat in my early youth, when I became interested in philological questions andwas deeply absorbed in them, I preferred the Armenian language to all theothers I then spoke, even including my native tongue.This language was my favorite at that time chiefly because it had its owncharacter and had nothing in common with the neighboring or kindredlanguages All its "tonalities," as the learned philologists say, were peculiar toit alone and, as I understood even then, it corresponded perfectly to thepsyche of the people of that nation.But during the last thirty or forty years I have witnessed such a change inthis language that although it has not completely lost the originality andindependence it had possessed since the remote past, it has now become a sortof "clownish potpourri of languages" whose consonances, falling on the