From: Rene - 10
Date: 7/20/00
Time: 2:52:37 AM
It was the summer of 1965 and I was home for the first time in 4 years having just got my BSc. Although much time was spent around the hospital because GrandMa was ill (see Challenging Fate) there was still much time to flex my 'intellectual' muscles. By the time I was 19, I had decided that I was no longer a believer. I had worked out fairly clearly why I had arrived at the decision and therefore did not missed an opportunity to test my arguments with all and sundry. I remember sharing my thoughts with Rosa and I surmised (rightly or wrongly) that she was sympathetic to my views. She suggested that I read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex which I did when I returned to London. My discussions with Angeline or was it Agnes were less successful.
In any case, the summer holidays went too quickly and soon I was back in London. I was sharing with Louis Goh at that time a flat (ex-brothel) along Clarendon Road, north of Holland Park tube station. It must have been the last installment of my unpacking that I came across a tiny pamphlet entitled "Letter to one who is about to leave the church". Out of curosity I read it. The one message that came across was - with what would I replace my religion? It was during the course of pondering this question that I decided to attend philosophy meetings at the Catholic Chaplaincy at Soho square. I was introduced to Kant, Decartes, Schopenhauer, and Kirkgaard - the Danish Christian Existentialist and elementary logic etc. It was from there that I drifted to Jean Paul Sartre (through Simone be Beauvoir) and more and more left wing thinking until I started to read Marxism and Mao.
Till today, I still do not know who slipped that pamphlet into my suitcase. High on my suspect list were Agnes, Angeline and Stephen. Will the person responsible all these years ago please own up.
That pamphlet plus the Vietnam War, the Paris student movement were important factors in my involvement in radical left wing movement between the years 1998 to 1974.
The answer to the question in the pamphlet therefore turned out to be something unintended by the person who slipped it into my case.