“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(During last week Jane told me she’d picked up that my troubles had been set off by the death of Bill Crowder on October 2. Betts didn’t write us about the death until we received her letter of the 25th on the 26th—which date being the day before I became ill. I hadn’t paid more than normal attention to Bill’s death, I thought, beyond feeling sympathy, and speculating with Jane about the money he must have left. Not that we wanted any of it. I hadn’t thought his death could bother me that much, for certainly I hadn’t dwelled upon it consciously at all.

The latest episode was indeed triggered by Bill Crowder’s death—triggered.

As she was in life, she would not have understood in any case unless the money definitely came from a recognizable, socially accepted output on your part. To some extent, the affair of Crowder’s death made you look at yourself through what you thought were your mother’s eyes. You were judging yourself, and have, with some regularity, according to those standards. This is at an emotional level, of which of course you do not intellectually approve.

Crowder, you think, left a large moneyed estate—far more than either you or Ruburt possess. At the same time, you are more than a little contemptuous of what we may gently call the mental culture of Bill Crowder’s life and mind. A part of you even thinks “Ma is that what you wanted me to be?”

Of course, you rebelled against such feelings and beliefs, but you did not rid yourself of them. You remembered being in Florida—the tempera episode —when you were supposed to be starting an enterprise with Crowder, and at that particular emotional level it seemed to you that you had made few inroads since —and again, you disapproved.

The male as breadwinner and the male as artist, or the title of the saga is “Bill Crowder may have been stupid, but he fit in with the crowd.”