Customer Reviews

On Love & Psychological Exercises: Two Books in One Volume

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Alfred Richard Orage (1873-1934) was the well known editor of 'The New Age', a literary magazine in London, when he started correspondence with P.D. Ouspensky in 1914, eventually met him in London in 1921 and moved to France in 1922 to study with G. I. Gurdjieff at The Prieure. He was then sent to the U.S. to start Gurdjieff studies in America. On his return to England he started 'The New English Weekly', but died in 1934.

'On Love', with a subtitle 'Freely Adapted from the Tibetan' has been said to have been written after a conversation with Gurdjieff and inspired by him. Love as a concept is described and analyzed with accent on what Orage calls 'conscious love', which he defines in the following way:

"Conscious love rarely obtains between humans; but it can be illustrated in the relations of man to his favourites in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The development of the horse and the dog from their original state of nature; the cultivation of flowers and fruit - these are examples of a primitive form of conscious love, primitive because the motive is still egoistic and utilitarian."

The other essays in this little book are 'What is the soul?', ' On religion', 'Talks with Katherine Mansfield' and 'Aphorisms'.

One of the aphorisms: "Man may degenerate like the ants and the bees, before he becomes extinct."

The 'Psychological Exercises' are meant to give work for the thinking and keep it active; a sort of gymnastics for the brain.

I really enjoyed this book. I accidentally came across "On Love" on the internet and having read it, found it to be one of the most moving and TRUE texts on human Love that i ever read. The rest of the texts in the book are also very insightful, not just for people familiar with Gurdjieff's vocabulary but for any free thinkers. Psychological exercises are interesting tools for self-development which should definitely be explored.

[NOTE: This is a review solely of _On Love_.]

A. R. Orage, On Love (Janus Press, 1974)

What a phenomenally bad little book this is. I picked it up not knowing who A. R. Orage was (it was horribly miscast in the "poetry" section at the CWRU book sale). I've done a bit of research since, and, well, had I known before, I'd have avoided this nonsense like the plague. Orage was the longtime editor of the magazine The New Age (and the term "new age" gets all of its most pejorative definitions from the stupidity of the magazine, originally), and it's pretty easy to tell from reading this.

The title essay, "On Love," is subtitled "freely adapted from the Tibetan," and I can honestly say that this being a translation is the only possible explanation for "On Love" being slightly more lucid than the rest of the essays contained herein. Every once in a while, Orage does manage to hit the nail on the head, and most of the time, he does so in this essay. (Thus it is not hard at all to believe it's a translation and not an original work.) This kept me at least interested enough to continue on to the rest of the book. My, was that a mistake. The three essays afterwards ("On Religion," "What Is the Soul?," and "Conversations with Katherine Mansfield") are all steeped in pseudo-religious double-talk (in the first, Orage posits his belief that behaviorism will be the bridge between science and religion. A bit of reflection for the modern reader will, one trusts, sufficiently serve to show how well THAT worked.), and it gets far, far worse in the last section, some pages of Orage's aphorisms. These are where the book truly reaches the heights of ignominy. One wonders if Orage actually understood the meaning of the word "aphorism." Certainly such passages as this don't fit the bill:

"A human being is one who works with three centres; he who works with two or one is sub-human."

Which may make sense to those who are versed in Gurdjieffian jargon, but for the rest of us makes no sense whatsoever. Pithy it may be, but understandable it is not. If I'm going to read aphorisms, I want aphorisms, not disconnected sentences that read like a spiritual version of the monthly magazine of the American Electrical Engineering Society.

So why, after all that, did I give this monstrosity a star and a half? Because Orage, who obviously was the six hundredth monkey on the six hundredth day now and then, manages a few coherent (and good) sentences in "On Love," and once in a great, great while comes up with an aphorism like "It is possible to have aesthetic emotions and not have human emotions." Now that is an aphorism. * ½