My mistake! So it was Sirius Monk - ok! btw thanks for the link... nice image of a Georgian mansion curiously located in America! Shows strong English influence Historically.
The name "Summerseat" is interesting as well - isn't there a famous Georgian city in Somerset, England (phonetically so similar to "Summerseat")? And Bucks County links to the County of Buckinghamshire in England? Definitely one to mull over
Interestingly, my mother, nee 'Hough', is [was] a direct ancestor of the man known as "THE Settler of Bucks Co. Pennsylvania." Richard Hough of Cheshire, England. [arrived in 1685]
My fav. author? W. Somerset Maugham...!
...and my fav. book by W.S.M.[?], "The Razors Edge" [I read it at 17 having seen the movie the year before...it strangely somewhat reflects my own life to date...
[from Wikiprdia]
"The Razor’s Edge is a book by W. Somerset Maugham published in 1944. Its epigraph reads, "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard," taken from a verse in the Katha-Upanishad.
The Razor’s Edge tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American pilot traumatized by his experiences in World War I, who sets off in search of some transcendent meaning in his life. The story begins through the eyes of Larry’s friends and acquaintances as they witness his personality change after the War. His rejection of conventional life and search for meaningful experience allows him to thrive while the more materialistic characters suffer reversals of fortune. The book was twice adapted into film, first in 1946 starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney, and Herbert Marshall as Maugham."
[Bill Murray and his remake, 'Butchered It"...IMHO...of course...Bill should have never cast himself as Larry. The scene Bill Murray in the script [that Tyrone Power played so adeptly and convincingly] where-in 'Larry' [Bill Murray] is seated in some sort of half-a$$ed Lotus position staring out at the sun rise or WTF it was he was staring blankly at and then suddenly breaking into a sardonic grin...more like that of someone aspiring to be a raconteur of ribald humor that 'just finally 'got the dirty little joke, rather than a spiritual aspirant that just obtained enlightenment. If you read the book and then decide to also see the movie {or vice versa} see the original movie...save Bill for 'Caddyshack']
"Maugham begins by characterising his story as not really a novel but a thinly veiled true account. He includes himself as a minor character, a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the major players. Larry Darrell’s lifestyle is contrasted throughout the book with that of his fiancée’s uncle, Elliott Templeton, an American expatriate living in Paris and a shallow and unrepentant yet generous snob. For example, while Templeton's Roman Catholicism embraces the hierarchical trappings of the Church, Larry's proclivities tend towards the 13th century Flemish mystic and Saint John of Ruysbroeck....
Wounded and traumatized by deathin the War, Larry returns to Chicago, Illinois, and his fiancée, Isabel Bradley, only to announce that he does not plan to work and instead will "loaf" on his small inheritance. He wants to delay their marriage a
nd refuses to take up a job as a stockbroker offered to him...
Larry moves to Paris ... study and bohemian life. After two years of this "loafing," Isabel visits and Larry asks her to join his life of wandering and searching, living in Paris and traveling with little money. She .. breaks their engagement to go back to Chicago marries a millionaire
Larry begins a sojourn through Europe, taking a job at a coal mine ... Larry then looks toward spiritual things for his answers rather than in books.... meets a Benedictine monk named Father Ensheim in Germany .... After spending several months with the Benedictines and being unable to reconcile their conception of God with his own, Larry takes a job on an ocean liner...finds himself in Bombay, India.... has significant spiritual adventures in India ...comes back to Paris. What he actually found in India and what he finally concluded are held back from the reader for a considerable time until, in a scene late in the book,...
Maugham discusses India and spirituality with Larry in a café long into the evening. He starts off the chapter by saying "I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of the story as I have to tell, since for most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. However, I should add that except for this conversation, I would perhaps not have thought it worthwhile to write this book…"
Maugham then initiates the reader to 'Advaita philosophy' and reveals how, through deep meditation, Larry had realized God ... thus becoming a saint—in the process gaining liberation from the cycle of human suffering, birth and death that the rest of the earthly mortals are subject to.
Just in time for the1929 stock market crash ...
...Maugham, like Hermann Hesse, was remarkably prescient, anticipating an embrace of Eastern culture by Americans and Europeans almost a decade before the Beats were to popularize it. (It should be noted that Americans had explored Eastern philosophy prior to these authors, notably in the first half of the nineteenth century by the Transcendentalists.) Maugham himself visited Sri Ramana Ashram, where he had a direct interaction with Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu, India in 1938."
I do so recommend the book to you young people....and I feel that the story is 'timeless' ...I figure it will always be a tale of insight and value....a thousand years from now and beyond...as it was 70 years ago...when written.
NOW....for ....a...
Side note/anecdote of curious astrological note:
My mother also loved the story [not as much as I, but She certainly did, and enough so as, one couldn't possibly overlook and miss it...she also had a copy of the book for me to read...which, as I believe I have already stated, was at age 17.
The day I saw the movie for the first time [in the late 1960s] and noted the performance of the actor, Tyrone Power, in the movie to my mother...she confessed in me that she had a 'teen-age crush on Tyrone Power and would go to see all his movies that she had been able to in the 1940s.
She also confided in me that she had become so enamored of Tyrone by the time she was 17 or 18 she affirmed that "...if I became a mother someday and had a son I wished he would become just like Tyrone Power."
My father on the other hand was an artist...his love for movies was drawn to 'style', more than substance...IMO...and His fav. actor...none less than Rudolph Valentino [well, my father, Tony, was of pure Italian descent...]
...so what?...why do I mention this?
I just thought it might be interesting to at least some of you astrologers to note, that...
A. Tyrone Power was a Taurus with Scorpio Asc. ...just like me.
{I once said to my mom. "You got as nearly, as to having, just what you wished for, utilizing what genetic material you had to work with, as you possibly could have had."}
B. Rudolph Valentino was born May 6....just like me....