Chapter Eleven - The Life of Alan Watts
1942-50 - Filthy Limericks and Compulsive Masturbation.
Sex, Seminary and Suburbia 1942-50
Watts didn’t much like the Illinois religious style, or his neighbours in Evanston, Chicago.
“The move (from New York) dropped us right into the middle of Midwestern upper-middle-class suburbia, which has much the same values as its British equivalent and from which I had been escaping most of my life. “
It was what was the beginning of what he later called his ‘square’ period.
“But now that I was deliberately going square, it was necessary for me to learn to act in style with this milieu”. And, he observed, “ almost all churches in the Mid West were as arid as mortuary chapels…memorials to a dead religion”.
Academically, he soared – by the second year, he was so far ahead that his teachers excused him from classwork and taught him only on a tutorial basis. He immersed himself in reading, and became particularly fascinated by the mystical tradition in Christianity – known as the ‘Cloud of Unknowing’. Here, he felt Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism touched. He was particularly interested in Saint Dionysius’ ‘Theologica Mystica’ which he translated from Greek and published in 1944.
In Easter 1943, during a visit to Ruth Everett in New York, Watts came into contact with Aldous Huxley, who told him about a group of Englishman living on the West Coast, including Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard and Huxley himself, all studying Vedantist ideas.
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