Dearest Pearl -

How I loved receiving your letter!-though it could have been longer. The courses you are completing are still vague in my mind. What exactly are Deconstruc-tional Dynamics, and how can they be applied to Paradise Lost and the Faerie Queene? As you remember, Granddaddy Price had lovely editions of both classics-much too expensive, though, to be deconstructed. And you say the man teaching it is a Communist! I'm sure it doesn't mean in England quite what it does here-something much more woolly and amusing, like George Bernard Shaw-Hut still I do wonder why Mrs. Thatcher and the Queen would give such a man control of young minds when there are so many honest and intelligent loyal Britons out of work.

I am pleased you are not coming home for the summer. I think it's a very mature decision. You would find the house very gloomy with just your father in it showing up now and then to change his shirt, and of course Europe has so many delights and you are so close to it, just a Channel away! And you are a bit old to go beach bumming and wind-surfing all day the way you could with perfect propriety when you were seventeen (not to mention the hideous damage you can do your lovely fair skin) and, though it makes me sad to think it, I do agree that your old job as lifeguard at the club pool (such a vision you were in that high chair, in your bikini and sombrero, with that cord of braided gimp holding the whistle around your neck) should go to someone younger. So Europe is fine, darling. But- Holland ? Isn't it just the dullest country on the Continent? Or at least the flattest. Surely once you've seen one little genre painting and one windmill you've seen them all. Your friend promises all this boating in the canals but it sounds very buggy to me, like bumping about in the Ipswich marshes. And I can't believe the beaches there aren't just coated with oil from all the tankers going by Sn the Channel. And when I try to picture these lumpy Dutch women in bathing suits I shudder.

Your friend sounds charming, perhaps too charming. Charm is what European men are famous for, but there are qualities our ungainly native boys have that are worth treasuring-trustworthiness, for one, and the willingness to work to support a family. If Jan's father is a count, why are they in the brewery business? And why was Jan at Oxford studying economics when the London School is the one you always hear about, where the Arabs and everybody go? I know you're finding my motherly concern tiresome but one does read stories here of the goings-on in Amsterdam, right out in that big main square-it's the drug capital of Europe, evidently, and still has boys with hair down to their shoulders and wearing buckskin and all that that went out here when Nixon finally resigned. Do be careful, dearest. You were sweet to reassure me that Jan is not a homosexual, but in a way it would be a relief if he were. You are all of twenty and very much feeling your womanhood. The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on-the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just slightly disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It's rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won't quite catch fire, isn't it? Though every day when the sun shines in the branches outside the window or the fruit in the bowl matches the color of the tablecloth or your favorite Mozart concerto pours out of WGBH at the very moment when you pour yourself a cup of coffee, you feel as if you are catching or have caught, after all-somebody held the match in the right place at last. Really I shouldn't be putting being a woman down-it has its duhkha but I wouldn't be a man for anything, they really are numb, relatively, wrapped in a uniform or plate armor even when their clothes are off-or so it has seemed to me in my limited experience. And I sometimes wonder if my limited experience, limited really to your father for twenty-odd years and a bit of hand-holding and snuggling before that, wasn't enough after all, and if for your generation more wasn't less. I mean, we all only have so much romantic energy with which to rise to the occasion, whether one man or two dozen makes up the occasion. Of course your Jan seems to you to be a fully feeling and responsive human being now, just as Fritz did to me a month ago. But afterwards, if you can bear to talk to them-these meaningful men-it turns out that their minds even at the height of the involvement were totally elsewhere-were not really in the relationship at all! They were only and entirely what we in our poor fevers made of them.

From my tone you might gather that I have moved out of Vikshipta's and Savitri's A-frame. I am living instead in a nicer, newer one, with two of the women I work with in the ashram offices-Alinga, a tall blonde from Iowa (tall, but without your beautiful generous figure with its long swimmer's muscles and your lovely push) and Nitya, who is the head accountant here. Nitya is rather small and dark and nervous and has been quite sickly lately. I can't quite tell if she and Alinga are lovers or just like sisters, but they spend a lot of time in the tiny kitchen, with the curtain that separates it from the room where I'm sitting drawn, murmuring and even arguing about this other woman called Durga and drinking jasmine tea. Vikshipta was furious when I told him I was leaving and-don't be alarmed, my sweet-became a bit violent. It turns out that far from being Durga's lover as I once imagined, he bates her for having (he imagines) corrupted the Arhat and shifted the emphasis away from hard-core psychotherapy to large-scale utopianism. He was always going on about the good old days in Ellora before the Arhat became so soft, when they were really making breakthroughs in consciousness-smashing, using Jung and tantra and human potential and "cathartic physicality," which seems to mean people got beaten up. Besotted as I was with love-a woman's drug-I slowly realized that he was really sounding very compulsive and fanatic about it. I said to myself, This man is a Hun. He can't tell tantra from a tantrum. He had a lot of unresolved anger and, looking back at that first encounter (did I tell you about it, or was that Midge?), I wonder if Yajna wasn't acting out Vikshipta's desires, in trying to break my jaw and the rest of it. (If this is news to you, don't worry about it, darling, I feel fine now, never better in fact, though I was afraid for a while my molars were shaken loose and I'd have to fly back to dear fussy Dr. Podhoretz.) I've gotten to know Yajna a lot better now and he's extremely suggestible-just a boy, though he's something like twenty-three or -four, perfect for you, in a way-his family is nice old railroad money from Saint Louis and I think if his head weren't shaved his ears wouldn't seem to stick out so much, and in a seersucker coat or a quiet tweed he would be quite presentable.

But, my darling, you are on the other side of the world and have your own life to lead and I mustn't be matchmaking even in my silly head. I do wish I had more positive associations with the Dutch, instead of clumsy wooden shoes and leaky dikes and Dutch treats and that awful way they treated the natives in Java when they had a chance, and still do in South Africa. You say Jan is lean and speaks English perfectly and plays the keyboard (is that really a musical instrument now or still just part of one?) beautifully, and if he pleases and amuses my Pearl I will find it in my heart to love him. I mustn't love any of your gentlemen friends too much, for I expect there will be many.

The young men here are rather realer to me than the beaux who with sneaky sheepish looks on their faces would appear at the door to carry you off in their convertibles and pickup trucks. Isolated as the ashram is, and united as we all are by our love of the Arhat, the generational barriers that at home (but this is my home now, I must remember!-they have a droll way here of talking about the United States, the country we after all live in, as "the Outer States") prevent us from seeing one another except as the stereotypes that television and advertising wish upon us melt away here, the barriers, and a not-at-all-uncommon sight is to see a young sannyasin in his violet robes and running shoes walking hand in hand with a gray-haired woman in her fifties. The other combination, the one we all know about in the outer world, the young chick and the old guy, is oddly rarer-their superior shakti perhaps gives the women here the upper hand that money gives men outside. At any rate, the boys would not by and large do for my Pearl. The gay ones have that gay way of walking so there's no up and down to their heads, just this even floating even when they're moving along very briskly, and their voices have that just perceptible fine-toothed homosexual edge that used to get my hackles up when I'd hear it in Boston (though of course I knew it shouldn't) but that here I've become quite happily used to. They're basically so playful, at least in regard to someone like me who is not quite ready to stand in for their all-powerful mothers but getting there, and good-hearted actually (they've suffered, after all, much as women do) and so devoted in their love of the Arhat, not to mention clever, truly handy at making the place run, in regard to things like electricity and irrigation and drainage and security and surveillance and counter-propaganda, which we have to put out or be crushed. They tend, incidentally, to be pro-Durga-she appeals to their sense of camp. Then the other type of young men, and they probably overlap but I'm never sure how, much, are the thoroughly habituated-the outside world says brainwashed-adepts at yoga and detachment and biospirituality and holism, young men who when they wait on you in the Varuna Emporium or the drugstore have this ghostly sweet hollowness in their voices as though nothing you did would break their tranquillity or alter their karuna for you. It makes me want sometimes to throw a fit or spit in their faces to get their reaction, but I fear that's the old devil in me-the prak-riti in me, the impure transitory nature that hasn't yet been burned away in self-realization. I sometimes feel as if I have traded being mother to one beautiful long-legged heartbreakingly intelligent and emotionally sound daughter for a tribe of shadowy, defective sons. As I write that, I sense your father's homophobe prejudices-he sees them as all diseased-speaking through me, and that is the old me, from the Outer States, terribly unworthy of all the love and trust showered upon me in this divine place by both the sexes.