My Guru and His Disciple
Author | : Christopher Isherwood |
Publisher | : Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Total Pages | : 338 |
Release | : 2013-11-19 |
ISBN-10 | : 9781466853300 |
ISBN-13 | : 1466853301 |
Rating | : 4/5 (00 Downloads) |
Download or read book My Guru and His Disciple written by Christopher Isherwood and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Guru and His Disciple is a sweetly modest and honest portrait of Isherwood's spiritual instructor, Swami Prabhavananda, the Hindu priest who guided Isherwood for some thirty years. It is also a book about the often amusing and sometimes painful counterpoint between worldliness and holiness in Isherwood's own life. Sexual sprees, all-night drinking bouts, a fast car ride with Greta Garbo, scriptwriting conferences at M-G-M, intellectual sparring sessions with Berthold Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center, a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety, and the pious drudgery of translating (in collaboration with the Swami) the Bhagavad-Gita. Seldom has a single man been owed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline; out of the passionate dialectic between these drives, My Guru and His Disciple has been written.