My Journey With a Mystic

This is a highly delectable book, and by delectable I do not mean a book to be taken lightly. Indeed, a more appropriate adjective to describe it would be glorious. Not only is it full of amazing anecdotes, it is also full of wisdom. The wisdom of life.
It is remarkable also in that it is an account of a boy's experience with an extraordinary human being whose remarks and observations could only have been partially comprehended at the time by the author. He frequently quotes Gurdjieff verbatim. His memory is absolutely astounding as well as his intuition. It must be borne in mind that when his mother put him in Gurdjieffs care—in the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fountainebleau—the boy had no idea who Gurdjieff was or what he was like as an individual. He learned fast. One opens this book and is instantly enchanted by the encounter of two very dissimiliar human beings. One realizes that this is no ordinary tale of childhood recollections.
To begin with, Gurdjieff was a thoroughly enigmatic figure. He was a living example of that Greek word, Enantiodromos, meaning the process by which a thing changes into its opposite. He could be tender, fierce, strict, indulgent, wise, clownish, utterly serious and a farceur all at one time. Even the author, then only eleven years old, who had been made Gurdieff's "slavey", did not know how to take him at times. Gurdjieff was a perpetual surprise. However, young as he was, and with no preparation for the ordeal, Fritz Peters, the boy, was astute enough to know that he was in the hands of a most unusual human being, a man who has been called a Master, a Guru, a Teacher, everything but a Saint.
Just as it is said that Jehovah showed his hind parts to Moses, so Peters reveals to us Gurdjieff's very real, very human aspects.