Eugene O'Neill and Light on the Path

EUGENE O'NEILL AND LIGHT ON THE PATH EUGENE O'NEILL did not become a mystic overnight. As a young man he was always drawn to the writers and philosophers who spoke of large forces beyond individual lives. Conrad's awareness of "mystery" was, in part, what fascinated O'Neill in The Nigger of the Narcissus; the vision of individuals swept relentlessly about by "the will to live" was what drew him to Schopenhauer. He himself spoke often of the ecstasy he felt when, at the age of eighteen, he discovered Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra in Benjamin Tucker's bookstore. However, for a long time after he had discovered Conrad and Schopenhauer, and even Nietzsche, Eugene O'Neill was still byno means a confirmed mystic. At Harvard in 1914-15, he thought the materialist philosophers and writers as interesting as the mystics. A classmate found him hesitating, philosophically, between Marxian socialism and Nietzschean individualism.! A year later he had made his choice; once and for all time he aligned himself with the mystics and individualists. The catalyst that set off his final choice was a single slender book-that, and the man who believed in and presented him with that book. The man was Terry Carlin, whom Eugene O'Neill met in New York some time in the winter of 1915-16; the book was Light on the Path. Out of the whole of Terry. Carlin's enormous influence on Eugene O'Neill, the most vital part, perhaps, was Light on the Path, the book that made Eugene O'Neill an active mystic. Certainly, it was Terry Carlin who brought O'Neill Light on the Path, for he gave the book to others at the same time. "I was very young in those days," Charles Hapgood would say of the time Terry Carlin brought Eugene O'Neill with him to Provincetown, "but I remember Terry gave me a little book entitled Light on the Path, containing Hindu wisdom, and it had a great effect on me for many years."2 Similarly, Terry Carlin gave Eugene O'Neill a copy of Light on the Path, for one of the first acts of Eugene O'Neill after he had come to Provincetown and moved into John Francis's apartments with Terry was to paint onto the rafters the opening lines of Light on the Path: Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears. Before the ear can hear, it must have lost its sensitiveness. Before the voice 1. Information in a letter to the author from Corwin Dale Willson (classmate of O'Neill's in Baker's 47), July 27, 1955. 2. From a letter to the author by Charles Hapgood, September 15, 1953. 260 1960 O'NEILL AND LIGHT ON THE PATH 261 can Speak ... it must have lost the power to wound. Before the soul can stand ... its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart.:I Light on the Path, put out by the Theosophical Society, called itself "A treatise written for the personal use of those who are ignorant of the Eastern wisdom and who desire to enter within its influence." Its aut}lors were supposedly two gentlemen who had died many centuries before, so said Mabel Collins-the member of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society who wrote it-humbly restricting her part in it to "written down by M.C." One of these gentlemen was a certain "Master of the Wisdom," who, according to Miss Collins, had the original rules in Atlantean script from the lost continent of Atlantis, which, theosophists believed, had sunk into the sea in 9564 B.C., after centuries of being ruled by "a dynasty of Perfect Men," the "Divine Rulers of the Golden Gate," whose works, theosophists thought, had survived in fragments in the Upanishads, the Bhagavat Gita, and among the texts of Taoism in China. This "Master of the Wisdom" gave the Atlantean rules with some elucidations ofhis own to his disciple, the "Master Hilarion," who in tum (after some 4,000 years) caused Mabel Collins to write them down-as she herself announced-in 1884. A year later "Master Hilarion" again caused...