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Dear Sir, - I have been a reader of your bright paper for just over a year. I was introduced to it in a peculiar manner.



Six years ago, when I was 18, I was unfortunate enough to get struck on the right knee by a hockey ball. This seemingly trivial accident developed into a serious bone malady, which resulted in the amputation of my leg at a point just below the hip. I soon got used to being one-legged, but confess that I was not at all thrilled at the prospect of going through life minus one of my beloved walking-stalks.

I managed to get a job as a typist in the West End, and began to settle down as best as I could.

I then began to develop an obsession with the Vacastere Cemetary gates, beyond which lay the grave where I was *certain* that ghouls in the tunnels beneath had feasted on my withered leg, once they had buried it near my black-grated family plot.



Obsessed with those loathsome bone-gnawers in the dark, and with only one leg, I daily walked (or should I say stilted) on my dark wood crutches to that wasteland of feasts and mayhem, staying to stare at the white stones until long after dark.

I gained strange new insights and interests- a fascination with antique religions, outdated surgical techniques, poetry, a vinegar-fed romanticism, and a deathly pale girl only two years my elder, but six months dead. She visited me in my dreams and told me that there was a great meaning to life, something mysterious like a God, but not quite.

She said that each person had an immortal twin, and that we were all pawns in a greater game, a game whose board was everywhere- but she could not, with her ghostly eyes, see the master-players. "Do not try to break the rules as though you were alien to them" she'd say- "because you can't. But you can become one with them, and cease being victimized by them thereby."



I wondered how a dead girl knew so much. She said it was too late for her; the dead are locked in their ways, deep in the Realm under the grim lunar disk, the Mystery of the Terrible-faced Moon. She had no place left to go but into a place that she couldn't get back from, ever. She told me she loved me before she went.

I was depressed the next day, more than I had been over the loss of my leg. In the deep places of my depression, I found a copy of your paper. It was of such poor quality, that I realized my life wasn't so bad. Your articles are purile and your writers in need of further skills at clarifying the essentials of what they write about. They do not communicate with people; they smash the fronts of their skulls and eye-orbits with glaring errors and half-wit attempts at cleverness.

But as I said, your paper was something of a Godsend. I may be legless, but you are hopeless. Everyday I read it and feel as right as rain.

* * *





"And they have planted trees without fruit, in my name, in a shameful manner."





"I tried to find Him on the Christian cross, but He was not there; I went to the Temple of the Hindus and the old pagodas, but I could not find a trace of Him anywhere.

I searched on the mountains and in the valleys but neither in the heights nor in the depths was I able to find Him. I went to Caaba in Mecca, but He was not there either.

I questioned the scholars and philosophers but He was beyond their understanding.

I then looked into my heart and it was there where he dwelled that I saw Him;
He was nowhere else to be found."
-Rumi

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