1719 TURK STREET,
SAN FRANCISCO,
28th March 1900.

MY DEAR MARGOT,

I am so glad at your good fortune. Things have got to come round if we are steady. I am sure you will get all the money you require here or in England.

I am working hard; and the harder I work, the better I feel. This ill health has done me a great good, sure. I am really understanding what non-attachment means. And I hope very soon to be perfectly non-attached.

We put all our energies to concentrate and get attached to one thing; but the other part, though equally difficult, we seldom pay any attention to—the faculty of detaching ourselves at a moment’s notice from anything.

Both attachment and detachment perfectly developed make a man great and happy.

I am so glad at Mrs. Leggett’s gift of $1,000. She is working up, wait. She has a great part to play in Ramakrishna’s work, whether she knows it or not.

I enjoyed your accounts of Prof. Geddes, and Joe has a funny account of a clairvoyant. Things are just now beginning to turn. …

This letter, I think, will reach you at Chicago. …

I had a nice letter from Max Gysic, the young Swiss who is a great friend of Miss Souter. Miss Souter also sends her love, and they ask to know the time when I come over to England. Many people are inquiring, they say.

Things have got to come round—the seed must die underground to come up as the tree. The last two years were the underground rotting. I never had a struggle in the jaws of death, but it meant a tremendous upheaval of the whole life. One such brought me to Ramakrishna, another sent me to the U.S., this has been the greatest of all. It is gone—I am so calm that it astonishes me sometimes!! I work every day morning and evening, eat anything any hour—and go to bed at 12 p.m. in the night—but such fine sleep!! I never had such power of sleeping before!

Yours with all love and blessings,
VIVEKANANDA.