Orwell recenserar boken The Ideals of East and West, som syftar till att sprida Österns stora visdom till västerlandet. (Ett koncept som frodas än idag om man dristar sig att kika på filosofi-hyllan i en normal bokhandel.) Orwell konstaterar att boken är ”mainly wind”, och att. . .
Mr. Saunders’s manner of writing is at times so like a parody of the familiar American Wisdom of the East stuff as to arouse the suspicion that he is doing it on purpose. Presumably he is not, but when one encounters, in the poem with which the book opens, a couplet like this: –
”That Love that transmutes pagan attitudes
To something nearer the Beatitudes,”
the suspicion is very hard to escape. This is the kind of book that brings both Asia and America into undeserved discredit.
Björn Östbring 