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Mary Butts Diary Entry Monday, 15 August 1921
We are now in a new position and the matter of a [magical] ‘retirement’ whittled down to 3 days silence, I hardly object to. But I fancy that will come to nothing because the Abbey is suddenly without money and without food. In two days I have had two small meals, and a little milk. We can’t leave. The weather is enchanting—High winds for two days, huge clouds, an audible sea—up here on the hillside. We’ve bathed in rollers, not in a crystal toy. We’ve slept out night after night, seen the stars move across, cuddled up together for warmth at dawn in a chill wind. The other side of the rock is a huge sea with spray columns and rainbows.
I guess my judgment is made—I’d sooner be the writer I am capable of becoming than an illuminated adept, magician, magic master of this temple or another.
If this business is to be the next conquest of the human mind, it will have its place in art (it has always had its place in art). Art is it, presented by the oblique approach. The direct, except in personal ways, [illegible] and intimate vision—is not my business.
Another way round. I would be an artist sooner than a saint. I want no new religion. I want to do no new religion, the pure wake of the soul come through looking at art, not through hearing preaching.
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