‘There is no god but God’; and according to Islamic tradition this has been used with full understanding, as a weapon for fighting the ‘greater holy war’, from the beginning. It is the same as that tremendous sentence from the Bhagavad Gita: “There is no existence of the unreal and no non-existence of the Real.”
It was in 1936, my thirtieth year, that the change of course set in. It was high time, because the ship of my life, drifting uncharted, had got into the shallows and almost run aground.
My marriage was the first wise thing i ever did. Even materially it marked the end of the descent and the beginning of the upward swing, for soon after it was agreed i received an offer of a post as english master at a government college for training ships’ officers and engineers in the new port of gdynia. They were looking for a suitable person and someone had mentioned my name.
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.