Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

184 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

take part in the work of discovering, creating and fulfilling the meaning of humanity on the planet.

The essence and mission of world-statesmanship, of world-guidance in our time consists in realising . . . the necessity and legitimacy of comfort, leisure, safety, power of self-attainment, power of learning the knowledge of facts and principles of existence for all. For all of us. For human inheritance is human and to be shared universally. Our task is common. Each individual must be enabled to share creatively in the glory of the common human work.!!

The bulk of Mitrinovi¢’s insights and ideas about the world, the past, present and future of humanity, as he developed and reworked them after the war was recorded in note form by a small number of dedicated associates (particularly Winifred Gordon Fraser) who had linked their lives to his and who remained with him until his death in 1953 at the age of 66. Throughout his life in Britain he had needed regular periods of convalescence at nursing homes in places such as Harrogate, Bath, Cheltenham and Worthing. He suffered a serious heart failure in 1936 from which he never fully recovered. Then, in the winter of 1947 when there was a failure in the gas and electricity supply in London, he took Jack Murphy and his wife to a matinée performance at the theatre. They had to walk back to his lodgings in Bloomsbury Street through the snow. He contracted double pneumonia, which aggravated his heart condition, and was confined to bed for a number of weeks.

In 1948 he moved from 38 Bloomsbury Street into a flat in Museum Mansions a short distance away. Later that year he was staying at a nursing home in Richmond, Surrey when he discovered a small mews cottage for sale to the rear of Norfolk Lodge, a large house near the top of Richmond Hill. The wife of one of his young associates bought the cottage and he moved in at the end of 1948. In 1950 the lease for the ground floor of Norfolk Lodge was obtained and Mitrinovi¢’s books were transferred there. As in his other homes, three rooms were set aside to symbolise the three key dimensions of life, with the books allocated accordingly: science and philosophy, the arts, and religion.

By this time he was very ill and could only walk with difficulty. Yet he seemed consumed with a desire to somehow finish ‘all that he had to say.’ He continued trying to communicate with those around him, dictating notes, continually questioning his companions to ensure that they had grasped the essence of what he was trying to convey. Eventually his condition deteriorated to such an extent that he was confined to bed. He directed that a number of symbolic objects be arranged around his room—such items