February 4, 2026
The Wind Returneth
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9 KJV
“But the chief point is: why does the rabbit do this knowing all the time exactly what the end will be?” P. D. Ouspensky, Strange Life of Ivan Osokin
I discovered Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, and P. D. Ouspensky, simultaneously in a book shop in England during my much younger years. I read the curious tale with great interest at that time, and re-read it only recently, as the drift of my thoughts nudged it out of my memory. Shades of Pierre Menard, the two readings, the callow and the chastened, were of two different books. Or, phrased another way, two different readers.
The novel was first published in Russian in 1915, and first published in English translation in 1947.
It is the story of a young Russian man who botches his life with a few key bad decisions, then via “the Magician” has the chance to re-live the offending years, and change those decisions—even as the Magician assures him it won’t make any difference. At the end, which of course isn’t, as he has predictably watched himself repeat his mistakes, knowing in some hypnotic way that he has seen all this before, he comes back to the meeting with the Magician, who this time offers some cryptic way out of the cycle. The reader expecting some decisive last puzzle piece to the human dilemma is left with the full responsibility of decoding the Magician’s non-explanation. There are two hints: the suggestion that the escape from the wheel of karma lies in a transformative change in self-awareness that embraces the burden; and the Magician’s emphasis on sacrifice.
A seeker, driven back to Russia from an inconclusive sojourn in India by the outbreak of the First World War, Ouspensky met the Graeco-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff in politically turbulent Moscow in 1915, and immediately felt he had encountered a mind energized with the esoteric knowledge of a system of human awakening that he had been seeking. To Gurdjieff, the problem was the mechanical living (“waking sleep”) that modern man, his natural inclination to the rote magnified in a highly mechanized society, had fallen into; and the solution, the “Fourth Way”—a shock-driven integration of the three traditional approaches to self-renovation—body, emotions, and mind—into a whole of “self-remembering.” Or perhaps, as I think of it, a re-location of the fulcrum balancing internal and external in the jungle of complexity we call the “self.” Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, starting as student and mentor, would work together over the next four years, as the Revolution of 1917 drove them from Russia, up until 1924 when the split over what the mathematician Ouspensky seems to have perceived as Gurdjieff’s straying from an empirical to a more emotional and excessive approach to his system took place. However, Ouspensky would document the fruitfulness of their years together in the posthumously published (1949) account In Search of the Miraculous.
Ouspensky and Gurdjieff died two years apart (1947/49), and in spite of their split, Ouspensky continued teaching the Fourth Way until his death. He had a significant impact on a great many students, but never really found personal happiness or peace—which, to me, doesn’t discredit the woo-wooness of the system so much as express a universal truth about systems: the point lies in the effort of building them, and the inevitable letting them go. Everything but human striving itself eventually goes out of date.
The “self” is a tenuous concept darting about in the vast complexity of human existence: our origins in the inert elements of the universe, our long evolutionary history of life/replication/death, our inheritance of the mystery of consciousness, the surface waves of a bottomless ocean formed by, composed of, we know not what—and our struggle is to discover what, if anything, we can do to steer this mad machine. Teachers either of madness, or transcendental insight, have long claimed there is a state of mind superior to the dumb mechanics of life on autopilot, that the key is where we position our focus in that groping to know what power we may have in a predicament that we seem to have no power over at all—and the discovery that pain lies in clinging to what we seem, or want, to be, to the narrative that accretes itself around us like a mollusk shell, in losing in the labyrinth of our now technology-melded minds the touchstone of “now.”
Some people read Ivan Osokin as a fable of eternal recurrence—which originally for Nietzsche was basically a thought experiment of self-acceptance: If you knew you would repeat your life exactly, eternally, would you willingly embrace those terms? Amor fati—the love of one’s fate. A ploy, perhaps, to nullify what threatens the self by recognizing its ineluctable role in the structure of the self. You can’t change what you are, only how you orient your self in the maze of what you are. This isn’t the same as “having a good attitude”—but an assumption of responsibility so complete it is the work of an “übermensch.” Eternal recurrence in this sense isn’t exactly the tireless interchange of the old and the new that is the subject of Ecclesiastes. Personally, I think of it more in terms of memory: we live our lives on endless repeat in our minds—or the failure of what most people expect from “eternal life”: same selves, same parameters of earthly life, without seeing such a context as capable of hosting only replays. What could such an “eternal life” be but the life it is derived from? What is this old feeling of familiarity? Of everything being the same? This certainty that the longed-for thing won’t happen? That “I” will never rise into something more than myself, and even if I do, I will still just be myself? I can’t squeeze anything more than “me” out of a self.
As for the living of the same life over and over, I’ll pass. Pretty sure that any transcendence of self will cost the self.
❦
There’s nothing new under the sun about wishing you could go back and live your life again and do things differently. I read somewhere that Ivan Osokin played some role in inspiring Harold Ramis’ 1993 film Groundhog Day. But a couple of other resonances seem more interesting.
Ouspensky himself cited Robert Louis Stevenson’s fairy tale “The Song of the Morrow” (in Fables, 1896) as a story sharing the spirit of his novel. It is the story of a beautiful king’s daughter in a kingdom between two seas who trades reality (“living like simple men”) for dream—a cautionary tale of how we lose life by shifting our focus within instead of on what’s in front of us. And a story of recurrence as the princess’s old, wasted self meets her young, radiant self in the end, ready to do it all again. The campaign to make your dream vision your reality is doomed to fail. Best to perk up when “the wind blows widdershins.”
And then, the intriguing story “Jones’s Karma” (in The Intercessor and Other Stories, 1931) by May Sinclair, an English writer and feminist well regarded in her own time (1863-1946), rather neglected today. The story is a sort of meditation on free will vs. determinism told by “the Mahatma” to his English friends to illustrate the compatibility of karma and free choice (“free to do the same things”) in the case of “Jones,” who, like Ivan Osokin, came to a point where he could repeat the years where he had made his mistakes. Unfortunately, in undoing his three targeted misdeeds, he set in motion whole new unfoldings of karma that drew him back to the same fate. If only he could have willed to undo his nature instead. Which, apparently, is possible only by not caring. That is, renunciation of self.
“Notwithstanding,” the Mahatma concludes, “there is a path of perfect freedom. When it is indifferent to a man whether he is himself or not himself, whether he lives or dies, whether he catches the cholera or does not catch the cholera. Thus he escapes from desiring and undesiring, from the pairs of opposites, and from the chain of happening and the round of births.”
You find life by losing it.