A Smile in the Mind's Eye by Lawrence Durrell Page A

it boils down simply to the crucial smile which I exchanged with Chang over the kitchen sink, and which needs no gloze. Language confronts this sort of reality with despair which rapidly turns to humour and, in the face of earnest or too earnest questioners, to slapstick. Another way of going about it would be to look up the Saxon word ‘ullage’ in the dictionary; the definition of it – ‘what a cask wants of being full’ – will exercise your reason to the snapping point – especially if your cask contains wine! It is another sort of koan – or can be used as one! The war was a time of hesitant stock-taking for all of us, and my little article with all its solemnity and youthful lack of experience – not to mention its inexactitudes – was a humble attempt to greet it with an act of affirmation. It may be a bit boring to read now, but for the young man in question it was a capital document.
    TAO AND ITS GLOZES
    (Lawrence Durrell in the following article suggests a method whereby the real Tao can be differentiated from that which is not the Tao. He rightly perceives that Tao is a philosophy, but also much more. Indeed it is ‘the uncreate unborn and eternal energy of nature, manifesting periodically. Nature as well as man when it reaches purity will reach rest, and then all become one with Tao, which is the source of all bliss and felicity. As in the Hindu and Buddhistic philosophies, such purity and bliss and immortality can only be reached through the exercise of virtue and perfect quietude of our worldly spirit; the human mind has to control and finally subdue and even crush the turbulent action of man’s physical nature; and the sooner he reaches the required degree of moral purification, the happier he will feel.’ – EDS)
    It has become a commonplace in. literary criticism today to refer to the disparities which exist between certain portions of Lao Tsu’s Book of the Simple Way: to accept, with the limpid resignation of the scholar, the apparent confusions (the word is repeatedly used) of which the text seems so full. So far, it seems, no one has tried to disentangle the conflicting fibres of doctrine and statement. Indeed, the task is not one to attract the boldest of textual scholars, for properly speaking no text exists which would offer the reader any canon on which to build an analytical or critical scheme. Yet it seems to me that a method may be found – perhaps not stable or exhaustive enough to satisfy the pedant, but sufficiently exciting to interest the student of Tao – a method by which one may catch glimpses of the original work among the glozes and shifting emendations of later scribes. The clue lies embedded like a diamond in the body of the text itself; a clue sufficiently cardinal to allow one a firm working foundation.
    Now Tao has been defined as a philosophy which remains always in sharp contradistinction to the Confucian (more generally the ‘Socratic’) dialect of the ethic; but it is more than that. (The word ‘Philosophy’ still carries with it the taint of method given it by the Greeks, from which it has been impossible to free it.) It is an attempt to localize an experience, which itself is too comprehensive to be included in the mere confines of language. Throughout the book one can feel the language probing, like a pair of giant callipers, attempting to circumscribe a realm, for the expression of which we have nothing between the madman’s idiom and the A minor Quartet. The searchlight of the ratiocinative principle is too weak to light up this territory: words themselves are used as a kind of sculpture, to symbolize what cannot be directly expressed: the heraldry of language is called into play to accentuate, to attest to, to pierce through the rind of the merely cognative impulse and delineate once and for all the mystery, the resting place of the Tao.
    â€˜The true Tao is not the subject of