Page 16 - Tales the Maggid Never Told Me

Madagascar Madness

Seidell anxiously consulted his handbook again. “No, I don’t see
anything like that listed here. Is it an infectious disease I should know
about?”
“It is pure fiction!” Weiss struggled to control himself. “A poison
gas rendering its victims insane until the antidote is discovered and
administered to the heroine’s father in the final chapter.”
“Oh.”
“But day after day, shooting those fifteen chapters, my curiosity
was aroused about Madagascar, indeed a remote and mysterious
island on the other side of the earth. It stayed with me, and when, a
few years later, I sought a land where I could become anonymous, far
away from the bright lights, ballyhoo and endless promotions of the
modern world, it naturally came into my mind.”
“I certainly never heard of it before I got here.” Seidell glanced at
his watch. “It does seem odd that a man with such fame and success
would throw it all away to live as a hermit in the tropics.”
“I appreciate your skepticism, young man,” said Weiss. “My
motivation was twofold. First, as I said, to make a complete and utter
break with my life in America, my career and my marriage. Many of
my feats of strength and endurance, as well as my ability to conceal
small objects inside my body, were the result of careful study of
Eastern disciplines, many of them not well understood in the West.
But all of them—East Indian, Chinese or Japanese—link superior
physical attainments to psychological or spiritual development. Yogis
are seen as freaks or mountebanks in the United States; their higher
mental attainments are ignored or discounted by intellectuals
committed to Judeo-Christian principles of duality in the cosmos. Yet
fake spiritualists and mediums often successfully adopt the trappings
of the East to fleece their emotionally confused clients seeking
contact with another world of ghosts and spirits. The irony, Private
Seidell, is that the stage magic trickery of dishonest Western mystics
is decried by sophisticated Americans and Europeans while they
flock, fascinated, with open purses to the latest imported swami or
guru performing the same deceptions.”
“I guess so,” mumbled the soldier, beginning to squirm a bit.
“That sort of thing never interested me.”

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