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As I came to more intimacy with his mind I found
that his best wisdom had never been printed. …he had a lamp within him which could illuminate the darkness. Almost everywhere I explored in his mind I found the long corridors lit.
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Æ (George W. Russell)
I first met the mind of Orage in the notes he wrote weekly in the New Age two
or three years before the war. I had found a number of that journal, unheard of by me
before, and I had hardly read more than a page when I began to feel an intellectual
excitement. Here indeed was a swordsman of the mind. I forget now what bubbles they
were he was pricking with such glittering persistence. What interested me was the
quality of the intellectual passion which inspired him. It had its roots in more profound
motives than the emptiness of the bubbles that were blown. I divined the idealist
speaking from depths of thought and feeling which are rare in journalism. When I met
him I found what I surmised of him was true. The roots of his culture were in antiquity,
in the wisdom of sages of the Kapila, Vyassa or Patunjali, a wisdom which though dated
thousands of years ago is still as many thousands of years perhaps in advance of
contemporary thought. The study of these had given age to his thought, and the habit of
seeing everything in relation to the profundities of being they spoke of. Yet this did not
make of him a man out of place in his time, uttering thoughts that others could not
understand. With the surface mind he could be as modern as anyone, and I do not know
of any contemporary journalist who could so swiftly penetrate to what was essential in a
policy, its emptiness or its fullness.…
[The complete text is available in the printed copy of this issue.]
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