An immediate income became necessary; no use thinking any longer of future royalties on unwritten books. With some difficulty i obtained a post in a tenth-rate boarding school. The life was uncongenial, but even so it never occurred to me to regret not having stayed on at oxford.
I quite realized, of course, that history or any other discipline of modern learning — sociology, astronomy, marine biology, whatever it may be — advances through the endless, patient, often anonymous research of scholars working either in battalions or deployed singly to strategic points, much of their work infructuous but some of it producing results which can modify a whole theory or inaugurate a hypothesis. To doubt the importance of such research would be to reject the very basis of modern civilization.
My school trained boys in classics, science and mathematics, but an enthusiastic history master captured my interest and got the headmaster’s permission to coach me for a historyscholarship. That was before the day of the welfare state, when a country grant came automatically to all who obtained entrance to a university. For me it was a scholarship or nothing.
It is true that by no means all envisage life as a purposeful journey. Happy are those who do and who act on the knowledge; but even those who do not are advancing or regressing according to whether they weaken or strengthen the grip of the ego, cutting some of its tentacles or putting out new ones.
Extrovert or introvert? I do not believe the definitions are anywhere near so widely applicable as commonly supposed: a person of high vitality is often both, a person of low vitality neither. Certainly I was both to a high degree.
Arthur Osborne, one of the most ardent and well known of the devotees of Sri Bhagavan, was the founder-editor of The ountain Path, the spiritual journal published by the Ashram. He is well known as the Editor of Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi and the author of Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge and other works.