Summerhill School
Leiston, Suffolk
My dear Reich,
December 7, 1954I look every day in the papers to see a headline: REICH
REIGNS IN ARIZONA DESERT ... in vain. Reminds me that the
government here has issued a booklet on rain-making; I'll get one and
send it to you, but there won't be anything in it that you don't know
already ... and dismiss as useless.
Steig sent me a circular with extracts from a speech of yours. It gave
me a great shock to find you believing in visits from other planets. No,
I said, it can't be true; Reich is a scientist and unless he sees a flying
saucer he won't accept it as a reality. I can't understand it. This CORE
men idea. * Too deep for me. He mentions a new publication called
CORE. t I haven't seen it.
I take it that Orgonon is closed up now. God, Reich, you have had a
hell of a life of struggle and work and opposition. It looks as if every
disaster was simply a reason for your going on to something else.
No special news from here. Zoe was 8 the other day; she is tall and
bonny and quite clever. She has little interest in grown-ups (including
me) but enters fully into the group life of her pals. She has just come to
me reciting a very obscene rhyme a boy taught her, and last week said
she liked hymns and would like to go to church. Just shows how far a
journey it is to a self-regulation world.
You wrote me to worry less and live more. I don't worry much
really, but at 71 I find it difficult to live more. No, Reich, I am just a
getting-old man with simple interests now-chopping wood, golfing,
listening to my super radiogram LP records (mostly Chopin and Wagner
and Schumann). Lecturing sometimes to try to make a penny or two.
Worst of all being lonely. My long separation from your dynamic person
ality has been a long sadness for me. I literally have no one to talk to
about anything of value. Most visitors have nothing to offer me, just
conventional gossip about cars or cinemas. Mrs. Haymes is coming over
in May and she will bring a little of the inspiring breeze that blew around
Sheffield and Rangeley.
* Cosmic orgone energy, Reich believed, was the power used by the spacemen
in UFO's.
t Cosmic ORgone Engineering. The successor journal to the Orgone Energy
Bulletin.