The Material Question

‘The local Turks and Greeks, who assembled in large numbers to watch these demonstrations, showed a great interest in the movements and in the music which I had composed specially for them, as well as in the various activities carried on by my people in preparation for the future work of the Institute in Germany; and I received an ever-growing number of requests from the visitors to be allowed to take part. At the same time the generally unstable situation in Europe continued to threaten all my projects, since the mutual distrust between governments made the obtaining of visas for foreign countries very difficult, and there were also great fluctuations of the rates of exchange from day to day.

‘I decided therefore that I would extend the range of my activities there in Constantinople by organizing public lectures to elucidate various aspects of my fundamental ideas, and by opening courses for the study of three fields of human manifestation, namely, movements, music and painting, considered in their relationship to objective science.

‘And so once again I plunged headlong into feverish activity, continuing to make money by every possible means in Constantinople itself, as well as in Kadikoy on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, to which I had to cross over by boat almost everyday. All the rest of my time I devoted to the classes I had organized, in which a great many new pupils were now participating—so that the only moments I could find to draft the synopsis of the series of lectures, which were to be read by certain specially prepared pupils, were during my trips to and fro on the ferry and in tram-cars.

‘I lived in this feverish activity for about a year, until the long-awaited visas arrived, by which time the chronic hole in my pocket, made by the rapid flow of money through it, had finally become somewhat stopped up and something had even begun to accumulate in the folds.

‘Since at that time the wiseacring of the Young Turks began to have a particular smell, I decided—without waiting for the various delights which were bound to develop in connection with these wiseacrings— to get away with my people as quickly as possible, with our skins whole. So, having speedily transferred my classes to Kadikoy and placed at their head some of the most qualified of my new pupils, I left for Germany.

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