A Letter about Language

I wonder if you know of the missive Aleister Crowley penned his previously estranged young son, Randall Gair (who was born in 1937 of a liaison with one Deidre Doherty of Cornwall). The Great Beast shares his views on the importance of language to one just beginning life in a particularly touching manner:

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

My dear son,

This is the first letter that your father has ever written to you, so you can imagine that it will be very important, and you should keep it and lay it by your heart.

First of all, let me tell you how intensely happy your reappearance has made me. I feel that I must devote a great deal of my time to watching over your career. I was very pleased to hear that you had decided to learn to read, and that, of course, means learning to write.

A word of warning about this. In these last years, children have been taught to write script, as they call it, which is a very bad thing. You must write in such a way that it impresses your personality on the reader.

On top of that, I wanted to tell you something about yourself. One of your Ancestors was Duke of a place called La Querouaille in Brittany, and came over to England with the Duke of Richmond, who was the original heir to the English throne, to help him turn out the usurper, known to history as Richard III. Since then, our family has made its mark on the world on several occasions, though never anything very brilliant. Now, I want you to take this very seriously. I want you to be very proud of yourself for belonging to such a family. Owing to the French Revolution and various other catastrophes, the Dukedom is no longer in existence legally, but morally it is so, and I want you to learn to behave as a Duke would behave. You must be high-minded, generous, noble, and, above all, without fear. For that last reason, you must never tell a lie, for to do so shows that you are afraid of the person to whom you tell it, and I want you to be afraid of nobody. I think that is all about now.

Now with regard to your education. I want particularly to insist on learning Latin, and I will give you my reasons. Firstly, anyone who knows Latin gains a greater command of and understanding of the English language than he would otherwise possess. He will be able to reason out for himself the meanings of words with which he is unfamiliar. 

Secondly, if you are well-grounded in Latin, you are halfway to a knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, for all these languages, as well as English, are derived from Latin. 

Thirdly, the most important of all, much of the unconscious part of your mind has been formed by the writing of Latin and Greek authors. This implies that you should also learn a certain amount of Greek. One of the wisest men of olden time gave this instruction to his pupils: "Know thyself," and learning Latin helps you to do this for the reason I have already explained above. I regard this as very important indeed. There are a great many people going about today who tell you that Latin is no use to you in the ordinary affairs of life, and that is quite true if you are going to be some commonplace person like a tradesman or a bank clerk. But you are a gentleman, and if you want to be an educated gentleman, you must know Latin. 

There is another matter that I want to put before you. It will be a very good plan if you learn to play chess. For one thing, it is a very good training for the mind, and, for another, it is the only game, of all the games worth playing, which lasts you throughout your life. You can get as much pleasure out of it when you are 60 as when you are 20.

I think that is all I have to say to you today, and I shall expect you to manage somehow to write me an answer. You see, much of the time we shall not be able to communicate face to face, and there will be a good many questions that you will want to ask me, which you cannot do unless you write good English.

That reminds me. There is one more point that I want to impress to you. The best models of English writings are Shakespeare and the Old Testament, especially the Book of Job, the Psalms and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. it will be a very good thing for you to commit as much as you can both of these books and of the best plays of Shakespeare to memory, so that they form the foundation of your style. In writing English, the most important quality that you can acquire is style. That makes all the difference to anyone who reads what you write, whether you use the best phrases in the best way. You will have to devote some time to grammar and syntax, and also to logic. Logic is the science and the art of using words, and it teaches you to think correctly without making blunders in reasoning, which nowadays everyone is liable to do just because they have not got the training which I am proposing to give you.

Now, my dear son, I will close this long letter in the eager hope you will follow my advice in all respects.

Love is the law, love under will.

Your affectionate father.

I don't think I need to make any concluding comment on this.

Next essay: Sinclair, Oscar and Aleister