Hindu Medicine c5.s1.27

c5.s1.27

Our meeting in 1940 was to be our last. From time to time letters came, discussing the revision of the lectures, talking about New York. As I learned also from others, Zimmer adjusted himself quickly, despite the many odds he had to overcome. At first he lectured before various private groups, but finally he found a position at Columbia University. Of his reaction to the new surroundings I need not write; he has himself described them in a short paper.⁷ He was impressed by the cheerfulness of America, the teeming life of towns and factories, but also by an element of monotony in the form of human existence here as compared to Europe. He was overwhelmed by the vastness of this continent, by the emptiness and desolation of its deserts. The grandeur of its nature appeared to him imbued with the divine indifference of the Hindu gods and the unearthly radiance of compassionate Buddhist saviors. In this, he saw one of the fundamental ingredients of the inexhaustible strength of American civilization. The epic of geology—the precipices of the Grand Canyon, their union of opposites—revealed to him the essential enigma of reality: the paradoxical harmony of antagonistic principles forming one whole.