Alvah Goldbrook Character Analysis

I'm telling you she was actually glad to do all this and told me “You know, I feel like I'm the mother of all things and I have to take care of my little children.”

“You're such a young pretty thing yourself.”

“But I'm the old mother of earth. I'm a Bodhisattva,” She was just a little off her nut but when I heard her say “Bodhisattva” I realized she wanted to be a big Buddhist like Japhy and being a girl the only way she could express it was this way, which had its traditional roots in the yabyum ceremony of Tibetan Buddhism, so everything was fine.

Alvah was immensely pleased and was all for the idea of “every Thursday night” and so was I by now.

“Alvah, Princess says she's a Bodhisattva.”

“Of course she is.”

“She says she's the mother of all of us.”

He was always being bugged by my little lectures on Samadhi ecstasy, which is the state you reach when you stop everything and stop your mind and you actually with your eyes closed see a kind of eternal multiswarm of electrical Power of some kind ululating in place of just pitiful images and forms of objects, which are, after all, imaginary.

[…]

“Don't you think it's much more interesting just to be like Japhy and have girls and studies and good times and really be doing something, than all this silly sitting under trees?”

“Nope,” I said, and meant it, and I knew Japhy would agree with me. “All Japhy's doing is amusing himself in the void.”

“I don't think so.”

“I bet he is. I'm going mountainclimbing with him next week and find out and tell you.”

I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect soli­tude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. […] I didn't want to have anything to do, really, either with Japhy's ideas about society (I figured it would be better just to avoid it altogether, walk around it) or with any of Alvah's ideas about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.

“Alvah says that while guys like us are all excited about being real Orientals and wearing robes, actual Orientals over there are reading surrealism and Charles Darwin and mad about Western business suits.”

“East'll meet West anyway. Think what a great world rev­olution will take place when East meets West finally, and it'll be guys like us that can start the thing. Think of millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramp­ing around the back country and hitchhiking and bringing the word down to everybody.”

I'm telling you she was actually glad to do all this and told me “You know, I feel like I'm the mother of all things and I have to take care of my little children.”

“You're such a young pretty thing yourself.”

“But I'm the old mother of earth. I'm a Bodhisattva,” She was just a little off her nut but when I heard her say “Bodhisattva” I realized she wanted to be a big Buddhist like Japhy and being a girl the only way she could express it was this way, which had its traditional roots in the yabyum ceremony of Tibetan Buddhism, so everything was fine.

Alvah was immensely pleased and was all for the idea of “every Thursday night” and so was I by now.

“Alvah, Princess says she's a Bodhisattva.”

“Of course she is.”

“She says she's the mother of all of us.”

He was always being bugged by my little lectures on Samadhi ecstasy, which is the state you reach when you stop everything and stop your mind and you actually with your eyes closed see a kind of eternal multiswarm of electrical Power of some kind ululating in place of just pitiful images and forms of objects, which are, after all, imaginary.

[…]

“Don't you think it's much more interesting just to be like Japhy and have girls and studies and good times and really be doing something, than all this silly sitting under trees?”

“Nope,” I said, and meant it, and I knew Japhy would agree with me. “All Japhy's doing is amusing himself in the void.”

“I don't think so.”

“I bet he is. I'm going mountainclimbing with him next week and find out and tell you.”

I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect soli­tude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. […] I didn't want to have anything to do, really, either with Japhy's ideas about society (I figured it would be better just to avoid it altogether, walk around it) or with any of Alvah's ideas about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.

“Alvah says that while guys like us are all excited about being real Orientals and wearing robes, actual Orientals over there are reading surrealism and Charles Darwin and mad about Western business suits.”

“East'll meet West anyway. Think what a great world rev­olution will take place when East meets West finally, and it'll be guys like us that can start the thing. Think of millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramp­ing around the back country and hitchhiking and bringing the word down to everybody.”