Maybe there is an innocent explanation, but if so, I cannot conceive it. Yet, I hope there IS an innocent explanation, Dolmen Meadows need only tell me, and I shall apologise for casting aspersions on them, and correct the record.

Consider this: there is an exchange with a person named JB, included in the French of the 30 December 1943 transcripts, and duly translated in the Book Studio edition. It is not in the Dolmen Meadows Edition. I would guess that this is because of the question on p.369 of the French, and Gurdjieff’s response at the top of p.370. Here is the relevant part from the Book Studio translation:

p.202 JB: Mr Gurdjieff, I would like to ask you how I could remove the most serious identification that I have to struggle against, and it appears when I am in the presence of a woman that I like.

Gurdjieff: How do you want me to explain it to you? Scientifically, or in a banal way? Choose.

JB: First, should I struggle by not seeing this person, or these people? Second, if I can see them, how do I avoid that identification?

p.203 Gurdjieff: Are we talking about people you like in general or about a specific person.

JB: One after another [laughs] Not all, but when I like a woman …

Gurdjieff: I don’t know anything about that, you do. There’s a very simple thing. You imagine this woman going to the closet.

JB: But it’s not sentimental. … I could do it. … It’s her type. …

Gurdjieff: Try to understand. Try to see all women like that. When you are in a quiet state, you have to look at them like that. And if it is necessary, you have to look at a certain type in one way, another type in another way …

There is a good deal more in this exchange. It is a remarkably good exchange about how something in us identifies with other people, and offers wonderful advice about how to deal with this. Why was it left out of the Dolmen Meadows edition? Do they not have a responsibility to tell potential buyers that it is an abridged version? Or “edited so as not to offend delicate sensibilities”? “Nothing a hyper-sensitive self-righteous old man could object to”?

One does not have to be a man identified with an attractive woman to use this advice. It can deflate an unrealistic image of anyone. Somewhere is Gurdjieff recorded to have said: “These people do not think I go to the water closet.” Or words to that effect.

I will leave this up for a little, to give Dolmen Meadows the chance to contact me and let me know if there is a good reason why the exchange with JB was omitted. If there is, there is no harm – the exchange is worth studying.