TALK THREE
February 24, 1971
A few days back Nirod asked me to give a talk. After much trepidation I agreed, encouraged by some friends. On my own I shy away from talking — except in private, where perhaps I overdo it.
Then a couple of days later he asked me what my subject would be. When I looked at him I suddenly thought of him as he had been before forsaking his first steady love — Medicine — in favour of that capricious Goddess, the Muse. It was Dr. Nirodbaran asking me as if addressing a consultant: "What will you prescribe?" And the response naturally came: "The mixture as before." (laughter)
Well, what is this repeating mixture? I would say it has three ingredients. One is the Ambrosia that is Sri Aurobindo, the second is the Nectar that is the Mother, and the third is rather a questionable one which can be best expressed perhaps in some lines of Gerald Manley Hopkins:
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: the taste was me.
So now you know the third ingredient. All the three form a kind of trinity-in-unity. And this trinity-in-unity may be formulated with a slight difference from the usual, traditional, great formula of the Christians: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Here it would be: the Father, the Mother and the Unholy Son! (laughter) If you like to conform more to the accepted terminology perhaps we could bring back the word "holy" — only we must spell it "holey" — the Son full of holes, riddled with defects and deficiencies, gaps of human ignorance, wounds of common mortality.
And this brings me not only to my subject but also to the Yoga here. Isn't it the aim of the Yogic life to convert what is a "h-o-l-e" into a "W-h-o-l-e", the limited fragmentary individual consciousness into the divine All, the cosmic abundance, the transcendent plenitude? But how is the conversion to be done? I may approach the answer by recalling what Vasari, an Italian painter of the
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Renaissance, who has written biographies of the great Masters of the period, has said about Leonardo da Vinci.
He remarks: "With the splendour of his most magnificent face he could make every broken spirit whole." Now it is interesting that this observation should have been about Leonardo, because, as you surely know, Leonardo is one of the few figures about whom Sri Aurobindo has let us believe, though very indirectly, that he was they in his past births. I used to pester Sri Aurobindo with all sorts of questions, dangling a long string of names: "Were you Homer, were you Shakespeare, were you Valmiki, Dante, Virgil, Milton?" And he stoutly said "No." I asked him also whether he had been Alexander and Julius Caesar. He replied that Alexander was too much of a torrent for him and, as for Caesar, he said: "You have forgotten that Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted for misappropriation of personality." (laughter) He was careful not to encourage commitment in this very delusive field, because once you start thinking who you were, there is no end to the riot of imagination. But, while he said "No" to all, he didn't answer in the negative to my proposal of Leonardo and Augustus Caesar. And what Vasari has said about Leonardo's face would apply in a superlative degree to Sri Aurobindo's. Even as I remember his face, all my skin seems to bristle. It is not only sadhaks who have found their shattered spirits entirely rebuilt; even others have been immensely affected. K. M. Munshi, for example, went to see him some years ago, and he came out with the statement that this was the most angelic face he had ever seen. Well, I have tried to catch in general the impression of Sri Aurobindo's face at the beginning of a poem I wrote in the early period of my stay in the Ashram:
All heaven's secrecy lit to one face
Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry —
A soul of upright splendour like the noon!
Now, this magnificent face of Sri Aurobindo has a profound meaning in the history of evolution. I believe that the central need of the evolutionary world is Avatarhood. Unless the Divine comes down to earth, man has very little hope of becoming Superman. He may ascend to the spiritual skies, and the soul may remain suspended in "a privacy of glorious light", but his mind will fall away, his life-force will wither, his body will crumble. Where then
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would be evolution? It is these instruments that have to be fulfilled, and unless they are perfected the cosmic travail cannot be consummated. But these instruments are obstinate creatures, they set conditions to the Divine — they say: "If we are to be divinised, show us that you can be humanised!" I think the conditions are quite legitimate, and the Divine knows it very well and He hurries to become an Avatar every now and then — that is to say, every few thousand years! For, unless the Divine gets on intimate terms with the earth, the earth is unable to respond. And, where intimacy is wanted, the relation has to be of love — if the Divine does not bring love to humanity, humanity will fail to respond to the Divine's call. And how shall solid and concrete earth know Divine Love unless the Divine Himself becomes solid and concrete to earth? I believe the central truth here has been seized with a fair degree of success by an Ashram poet at almost the commencement of his frail, faltering, fumbling, failing and falling existence at this place. The poem is called This Errant Life. It runs:
This errant life is dear although it dies;
And human lips are sweet, though they but sing
Of stars estranged from us; and youth's emprise
Is wondrous yet, although an unsure thing.
Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!
I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.
If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow
Its mortal longings, lean down from above,
Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,
Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.
For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:
Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,
And all Thy formless glory turn to love
And mould Thy love into a human face.
This is the eternal cry from below. And never before in history has it been answered as in our Ashram. For, the human soul would have been content with one Avatar face: we are given two! We are simply heaped over with a luxury of light. And if you want to have the description of the Mother's face, I think you will have to go to a greater poet than the specimen before you. You will find descriptions very accurate and very penetrating when Sri
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Aurobindo delineates the heroine of his epic that is a legend and a symbol. Read what he writes in Savitri about Savitri and you will have an idea of the Mother's bodily presence, the Mother's facial expression.
Now that I have touched upon Savitri, the topic with which I closed my last talk, I might say a few things about it. In fact, I have already said some of them to a friend of mine a week or so back. He was sitting and trying to meditate. I went up to him and put him a silent query as to how he was. He looked up; there was a smile on his lips but a depression deep as hell in his eyes. And he brought out the great pronouncement: "I am getting on."
Well, it reminded me of an exchange I have sometimes heard in South India, the morning greeting among some Tamils. There is a lot of compression and intuitive packing in this exchange. One of the parties asks: "How are you, I hope?" (laughter) And the reply is: "Somewhat, I am afraid." (laughter) I thought my friend did seem as if he was in a bit of "somewhat" condition, (laughter) So I asked him: "Why not tell me what exactly is the matter?" He looked up sadly and said: "The trouble is precisely that I do not know what exactly the matter is. All I can say is that several years ago I was in touch with a certain set of circumstances and personalities, and the result is an undiagnosable damage inside me." "Then perhaps," I answered, "I can help you a little." So I sat down and told him a story of my own.
It's connected with an experience which I recounted in my very first talk — my very first abnormal or supernormal experience: I somehow got out of my body and began to float in the air above my own form stretched out in bed below, and moved in the room from wall to wall, bouncing as it were to and fro. Now this escape got encouraged by a little practice of Yoga. After coming here it became more frequent and it was very enjoyable indeed while it lasted: I could feel free from all the cares of the world when I was out of the body. But when I went to Bombay and stayed there for several years, it became a little dangerous because the Guru's protection was not immediate. And there I found that I would loiter about in all sorts of unpleasant places. In those subtle worlds, you must understand, there are pretty unpleasant spots. There are extremes: on the one hand you find beauty surpassing anything that any poet has described — on the other you find indescribable squalor, filth, wickedness. Wickedness, of course, from our point of view — for the beings there what we call hell is really a heaven
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of perverse pleasure. And it should be so because these are not evolutionary worlds but typal ones, and God would be indeed unjust if He didn't allow them to get pleasure in whatever way is open to them. In Bombay, exploring these worlds, I fell into a company which seemed terribly hostile. Sri Aurobindo has given a hint in Savitri about such company: "their very look is a calamity." And these creatures, after showering their calamitous looks on me, got behind me and, when it was least expected, I felt a tremendous crash on my back: I felt as if my whole spine had been broken to bits.
I didn't know what to do; naturally with a shock like that I woke up and the subtle body rushed back to the fortress of the physical, but I was sick — sick in a way that seemed incurable. What could I do? Should I call a doctor? The doctor would come and thump my chest and hear the sounds in my lungs and feel my spine and find it absolutely intact. Then all of a sudden I remembered that when you cannot have the privilege of seeing the face of the Mother or Sri Aurobindo, which can make whole every broken spirit, you can turn to the poetry of Sri Aurobindo, that poetry which is called the Mantra. The Mantra is the highest spiritual poetry, as you know: it is the Divine, as it were, expressing Himself directly, not through any other medium of consciousness. The Divine Being, getting embodied in words on the very plane of the Divine Himself: that is the Mantra. It is the Word from the Overmind, the Supermind's delegate that has been the governing Power of the universe so far.
I remembered also that I had asked Sri Aurobindo what plane a certain passage in Savitri — the description of Savitri herself in Canto Two of Book One — had come from. Very reluctantly he had admitted it to have come from the Overmind or rather the Overmind Intuition, as he very cautiously used to label the source of the highest poetry in his own works. The passage begins:
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.
It goes on to reach somewhere in its middle what I consider the Mantra of Mantras:
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As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple door to things beyond.
Onward from glory to glory the passage moves. I recited the whole of it, and when, on the way to the close, I came to the line —
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light —
I suddenly felt cured, made whole.
So I said to my friend: "If you can read Savitri all your inner troubles will tend to disappear. But you have to read it aloud to yourself." My friend was surprised. "I have read Savitri several times," he said, "but I have never thought of reading it loudly." I explained: "That is the way to read it because the sound-significance is tremendous. It must go into you through your ears. You cannot just read it with your eyes, you have to read in a slow controlled voice bringing out the vowel-values, the consonant-combinations and the sound of the line as a whole. It is then that the language sweeps beyond thought to, stir awake deeper tracts in you: it is then that the Mantra will wing home to you. And I can assure you that if you let it do so your undiagnosable damage will disappear."
I do hope it has started disappearing by now with short exercises of mantric incantation.
Now that we are on the matter of poetry I am a little tempted to make a digression. If the Mantra is the supreme poetry, there must be some quality of it in all verse — not directly but at least indirectly. Poetry by itself is not necessarily a spiritual art in any immediate sense. A poet can write all sorts of things which we do not associate with spirituality: a man can even be an atheist, as the Roman Lucretius was, and still be a major poet. How this could be is well hit off by the English poetess Elizabeth Browning. She has written about Lucretius's atheism that he "denied divinely the Divine." There you have the essence of the poetic utterance
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revealed. It is not the content, the substance, the matter, which has to be spiritual, but there is something in the form, something in the style, something in the manner which is as if a godhead came and said "I don't exist" and walked away and you saw by his figure, his gesture, his gait that he still existed and would ever exist. That is what poetry gives us — the perfect expressive shape, the inevitable rhythmic mould. And perhaps the same truth is also stated in another fashion when Flecker observed: "Poetry may not save souls, but it makes souls worth saving." It makes souls worth saving because it brings about a certain enrichment of consciousness, a subtilisation of it, a transfusion of beauty into it, which renders it very precious material for somebody who can really evoke and bring it out to meet its source, the Eternal and the Infinite.
This quality of the indirect soulfulness, the subdued or concealed divinity, has been sought to be formulated by many critics. Some kind of light is perceived as its sign. But the perception is variously phrased. A French writer, trying to describe what good writing — bonne prose ou poésie — should be, has said, "Claire, encore claire, toujours claire!"1 Well, I strongly suspect that when he made this pronouncement his wife was standing at his elbow and her name happened to be "Claire", (laughter) Oh my God! what have I done? I have made a dig at petticoat influence in connection with a name borne by a lady in the audience, who is very charming but also very dynamic. (Turning to the lady) I apologise to you, madam; I hope my life won't be in danger, (laughter) But the name gives me a clue, because it is one that means "clear" and yet is combined with the sex which throughout history has made poor man raise his hands in despair or scratch his head in bewilderment — the sex to which we may apply those words of Churchill about Soviet policy: "a riddle wrapped in an enigma enclosed within a mystery." (laughter) The combination of "clear" with such a condition of being leads me to another expression in French which, I think, is nearer the mark we are seeking. It is an expression related to Painting: "clair-obscur" — what the Italians call "chiaroscuro" and what in plain English is "light and shade". Poetry must bring a central clarity which with a sure grip upon our minds leads us towards a mystery which is beyond mind. The poet may de-clare his designs upon the "obscur" like the Negro
1 "Clear, again clear, always clear!"
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preacher when he said to his congregation: "Beloved brethren, we shall now fathom the fathomless and unscrew the unscrutable!" (laughter)
Let me, however, warn you against pseudo-mystery, the facile massing of shades, the obscurity due to confusion or carelessness. The true mystery is that which remains over, an indefinable nimbus, when in dealing with heights or depths we have made our utmost effort to be clear. And even about this mystery I may utter a clarifying word. All true mystery is ultimately the Divine Presence. Now, to the Divine His own Presence is self-luminous: it is not a mystery in the ordinary sense at all. It is a mystery only to the mind of man. It is a supreme, a colossal clarity to the Divine Himself. So I should say that in order to be poetic we have to try and be clear in the way the Divine, when expressing Himself, would be clear and luminous to His own consciousness. And there again we come to the Mantra — the Divine's direct self-expression which in some mode or other should be found pervasive of all poetry.
It is indeed right that I should end on the note with which the French writer mistakenly began, and nobody with the name I have conjectured to be his wife's need feel let down by my analysis — for, if we are to get rid of clarity in every sense and if my analysis did any final letting down, what would I have to say to my own blessed name given by Sri Aurobindo: "Amal Kiran", which means "A Clear Ray"?
I will now, like a clear ray, shoot towards its parent Sun — the presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother — and give you a few recollections of my contact with them.
I shall begin with what happened when I first came here and stayed in what I have called Vasudha's House but what would be labelled in our Ashram English as "Old Amal's House" (laughter) because Amal, although only 23 at the time, had it as his old residence before he moved on to another place. In this house I saw a well, and naturally with the vigour of 23 I pulled up water from it and with the equally natural rashness of 23 I drank the water! (laughter) The result was severe diarrhoea. Perhaps this was an experience of purification — purification starting at the wrong end! I did not know how to check the process. So I sent for the Ashram doctor. The doctors in the Ashram now are innumerable. At that time there was only one and even he was almost invisible,
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because he was ever so thin, (laughter) He appeared to be a being of one dimension attached to a wispy beard.
He came to see me. I was in bed. He sat next to the bed and then, as I was looking at him, he shut his eyes and sat like that for what seemed to me a rather long time. I got a little impatient and said, "Doctor." He sweetly replied, "Yes?" I continued, "I want some treatment." He answered, "I am giving you treatment" — and again shut his eyes, (laughter) I imagined that he was thinking of the right drug to give me, and concentrating for the purpose. But he didn't do anything at all. So once more I poked him a little. "What?" he asked me. I said, "I want some medicine." "Oh, you want some medicine?" "Of course," I said — and he was so disgusted he got up and walked away with a curious smile and after a short time brought a bottle of medicine, which I can say was quite effective, a tribute to him. But from then I began to guess there was something here called doing things by meditation. The doctor's behaviour, his eye-shutting, was an eye-opener to me, and later I discovered that meditation could do a lot if the Gurus themselves meditated on us instead of our meditating on ourselves or on each other! (laughter)
One of the instances was when, on a visit to the Ashram during the period I spent in Bombay between my original arrival and my second coming, I had one of my famous falls. This was a very bad toss. I was on my way to the Ashram gate. I tried to take a short cut where there was a gutter. Instead of going over the gutter I went into it. (laughter) My left leg got so twisted at the hip that I had to keep sitting down in the gutter. Several people passed by but didn't do a thing. When the sister of the friend with whom I had come did the same I couldn't help protesting. "Don't you see what I am doing? I can't get up. I have fallen here." She said, "Why, I thought you were just sitting and talking. You sit anywhere and find occasion to talk to people." (laughter) I was astonished. "Now, please do something and get me out of this place." Then she and some others picked me up and somebody from inside the Ashram came out — I think it was Dyuman — and looked at me and went to report to the Mother.
I had to be in bed, of course, for a few days. I sent for crutches from the Dispensary. The Darshan was shortly due and 1 did not wish to miss it. When somebody reported to the Mother that I was bed-ridden and didn't look as if I could change my horizontal position, she coolly said: "I am sure he will come to the Darshan.
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He is not the sort to lie down for long, he will come anyhow." When I heard this, I said: "I surely must go." So with crutches I went up to the bottom of the staircase leading to the Darshan Room, and then some of Udar's muscle-men came with a chair and put me on it and carried me upstairs to the entrance. At the other end of the long passage Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were seated. I was put down at the staircase-end. I took again to my crutches and with as much slowness as I could reasonably indulge in I started moving, so that I could have the longest Darshan I would ever get the opportunity of enjoying, (laughter) Laboured step after step, very dramatically gradual, I kept nearing the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. All through my crutch-propped progress they kept looking at me, the Mother sweetly, Sri Aurobindo calmly. On reaching close to their seat I felt a great power coming into me. But to my horror I found that Sri Aurobindo was concentrating on the wrong leg! (laughter) You see, the right leg was the wrong leg and the left leg was the right leg! (laughter) — quite a confusing matter. And somebody facing me after my fall could easily report my right leg to be the injured one since my left leg would be opposite his own right! Anyway, what was I now to do? I just moved my really injured leg, but to no effect — the concentration was so complete! But I realised, soon after, that for the Divine it is not necessary to be omniscient in order to be omnipotent; for, so long as some leg of Amal's was being concentrated on, the effect was bound to be terrific. In fact, I threw away my crutches almost the same day and, using two sticks instead of my habitual single one, I came to the Mother at the next Pranam. I told her: "Mother, this is the first time I have had a fall in the physical gutter...." She laughed and said: "Well, how are you now?" I replied: "I am much improved, but what do you think? Should I inform Sehra in Bombay about my accident?" She at once said: "Oh no. Why worry the poor girl? Within two days you will be walking normally." I was surprised at the confident prophecy. But actually it did come true — within exactly two days I was up and hobbling about in my old way, as if nothing had happened. This shows how spiritual force can work.
I may give you another instance. It was in connection with a side-tooth of mine. You see, I had a bit of tooth-trouble once and I went to our oldest dentist. Our dentists here have a very important function to perform, as you must be aware: their job is to see that before we become supramental we don't become supra-
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dental! (laughter) The dentist examined my tooth and gave the verdict: "I find that your tooth has got broken and will have to be extracted." I said, "What, doctor? Say it again." He repeated, "Yes, it will have to be extracted." I exclaimed, "Wonderful! Never in my life have I had a tooth extracted. Now I will have this thrilling experience. Please, doctor, go ahead immediately." He worked at it for half an hour and brought out piece after piece until some pieces just wouldn't come out. So he sent for his wife to assist him. She came and they applied jointly a small chisel and hammer and he successfully got all the pieces out, as a good dentist should. Then I went home. After some time severe pain started. I thought it was the natural consequence of a tooth-extraction and that I just had to grin and bear it. The whole day passed and still the pain persisted. I didn't know what to do. I kept fumbling in my mind for a way out. I suddenly recalled that a day earlier I had received from the Mother a letter of only four words in green ink to a question of mine. They were: "It is all right." Somehow they got linked up with my present state. I asked myself: "Why is my state so bad? It should be all right. The Mother has spoken about it in advance." I got the inspiration to put that paper on to my cheek, with the four words pressed against it where the gap was there inside the mouth. Believe me, within 3 minutes or less, the ache was completely gone. It returned only after 4 hours. Here was a little miracle. Evidently I had got in touch with the Mother's Force and it had passed through those words to my sorry plight. The next day the dentist helped me out.
I have some other incidents also to report but there doesn't seem to be time enough. I shall just go to another aspect of what the Mother and Sri Aurobindo can do with us. They can do the most impossible things. You know how the Mother made out of me a keeper of furniture — a role I could never have dreamt of. As I told you in an earlier talk, I became quite a good keeper, and many lessons too I learned during my furniture-keeping career, including, of course, a couple of falls. Several amusing occurrences too I could record. I'll cite one.
I used to receive appeals for various kinds of things from people. Our Pavitra once sent me an appeal. He was not quite a master of English at that time. He sent me the note: "I want four blocks to understand my table." (laughter) I supplied to him what he required, with a reply-note: "Here are the needed blocks. Fortunately they are not blockheads: otherwise your table would never
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have been understood." (laughter) Later Pavitra told me he realised the joke and greatly enjoyed it.
Now, what else can the Mother make of one? A big shock came to me when I learnt that Mother India, of which I had been appointed Editor, was to be a semi-political paper. I writing on politics was something unthinkable! I told the Mother: "1 have no grasp of politics, no interest in it." She said: "Neither have I." (laughter) I cried out: "What then shall we do about it?" She very calmly replied: "There is Sri Aurobindo. He will do everything." And he jolly well did — because I began writing political articles as if I had done it from my birth. I even came to be venerated as a political oracle. Every time I visited Pondy, people used to flock round me, asking my opinion on this event, that issue, the other situation. And I could deliver confident statements as though I were inevitably inspired. Within me I couldn't help laughing.
Sri Aurobindo could make a political thinker out of me as Napoleon could make generals out of mud, as it were. But I must say that there has to be a line drawn to Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's power in such things — because once during a visit of mine to the Ashram, when Pondicherry was still French, she spoke to me very seriously at Pranam: "Both Sri Aurobindo and I have come to the conclusion that you should be the next Indian Consul in Pondicherry." I muttered inwardly to myself: "Good Heavens! This is really Divine Power running riot. I must check it. How can I be a Consul? How can I ever do such a difficult no less than dreary thing?" But aloud I just said: "All right, all right. I shall see what can be done." (laughter) Rather dazed, I went to Udar, who was a very great friend of mine at that time. I poured out to him my bewilderment. He said: "Don't be afraid. So many of my friends have become Consuls in different places. Their staff carries on all the work. It is a job for absolute duffers!"
Udar's words were not exactly complimentary but he certainly put heart into me by knocking all head out of the job! As luck would have it, the crisis passed when it was learnt that in India you cannot become a Consul unless you go through the whole grill of the diplomatic service. And soon afterwards Sanat Banerji — no duffer absolute or relative — was appointed Consul and he was an excellent instrument of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother such as I could never have been in that post.
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I think we must stop here. 1 may keep some stories for another occasion if you are willing to come again and listen. At the moment 1 shall say only one thing and perhaps that can be the summing-up of all my speeches as a Yogi. On September 17, 1934, after nearly seven years of attempt at Yoga I wrote to the Mother: "Pardon my writing to you without any specific reason; but I feel like telling you that you are extremely dear to me. In spite of my thousand and three imperfections, this one sense remains in me — that you are my Mother, that I am born from your heart. It is the only truth I seem to have realised in all these years. A very unfortunate thing, perhaps, that I have realised no other truth; but I deeply thank you that I have been enabled to feel this much at least."
Sri Aurobindo replied something which all of us might remember. He said: "It is an excellent foundation for the other truths that are to come — for they all result from it." And the Mother wrote underneath: "My blessings are always with you."
Well, I don't know whether the other truths Sri Aurobindo refers to have resulted from what I realised over thirty-six years ago. But the foundational one still stands and I hope it always will. It is the only compliment I can have to give to myself.
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