Many thanks for your admirably detailed letter. The attitude you speak of, that of cursing the world and oneself, is, in a sense, the beginning of wisdom. Revolt is the first reaction of an intelligent man when he begins to understand the desperate nature of his situation in the world; and it is probably true to say that nothing great has ever been achieved except by a man in revolt against his situation. But revolt alone is not enough—it eventually contradicts itself. A man in blind revolt is like someone in a railway compartment trying to stop the train by pushing against the opposite seat with his feet: he may be strong enough to damage the compartment, but the damaged compartment will nevertheless continue to move with the train. Except for the arahat, we are all in this train of samsāra, and the problem is to stop the train whilst still travelling in it. Direct action, direct revolt, won't do; but something, certainly, must be done. That it is, in fact, possible to stop the train from within we know from the Buddha, who has himself done it:

I, monks, being myself subject to birth, decay, and death, having seen the misery of subjection to birth, decay, and death, went in search of the unborn, undecaying, undying, uttermost quietus of extinction (nibbāna), and I reached the unborn, undecaying, undying, uttermost quietus of extinction.
Revolt by all means, but let the weapons be intelligence and patience, not disorder and violence; and the first thing to do is to find out exactly what it is that you are revolting against. Perhaps you will come to see that what you are revolting against is avijjā.

Nanavira Thera on scholars

 I have been busy re-typing my Notes on Dhamma. But will anyone care to publish it? I don't think anyone would describe the Notes as a 'popular' work: in the first place because it is specialized and assumes in the reader some acquaintance (or at least a willingness to become acquainted) with the Suttas on the one hand and with modern philosophical ideas on the other; and in the second place because it is openly hostile to the disengaged critical attitude of the scholar, and so is hardly likely to be popular amongst the pundits, at least if they are no more than that. (In my own way, I am just as much 'engaged' as Graves is in his; and I am at one with him in his scathing remarks in the Goddess about scholars, having also myself had experience of the conspiracy of silence with which they habitually greet the unfamiliar or the unorthodox. No doubt you will recall Samuel Butler with his professors at the Colleges of Unreason:
It seemed to be counted the perfection of scholarship and good breeding among them not to have—much less to express—an opinion on any subject on which it might prove later that they had been mistaken. [Erewhon, Ch. 22]
'The scholars' says Graves [p. 21] 'can be counted upon to refrain from any comment whatsoever'.)[a]

So then, assuming that there are people in England (there are, certainly, a few in Germany and perhaps France), neither stuffy scholars nor yet silly sheep, who might read the Notes, what is needed is a publisher who is prepared to accept a work that is both unpopular (learned) and unpopular (unorthodox). But is the Notes respectable enough? I have sprinkled it with references to reputable philosophers, but I can't be sure that the cloven hoof is not still showing through this disguise. (Take Zaehner, for example. He has his own ideas about Pali Buddhism, holding, in spite of the Pali Buddhists, that it can be included under the general heading of 'Mysticism'. Is he, or is he not, one of those who, according to Samuel Butler, 'devote themselves to the avoidance of every opinion with which they are not perfectly familiar, and regard their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which, if an opinion has once resorted, none other is to attack it'? Would he or his colleagues approve of publishing the Notes?)

But perhaps it would be a waste of time to try and get such a book published in England—it is, as Graves said about his White Goddess, 'a very difficult book, as well as a very queer one, to be avoided by anyone with a distracted, tired, or rigidly scientific mind'. (p. 9) Besides, I have never heard the book criticized, and it may be, for all I know, a bad book (I mean as regards form and style and so on: I myself am prepared to answer for the content—except, perhaps, for the last part, which is my own speculative effort, and for which I can cite neither chapter nor verse in support). I am certainly more than half inclined to make no effort to get it published, particularly if it is going to encounter difficulties. (I think I told you earlier that both the P.T.S. and the Buddhist Society have been sent copies of the cyclostyled edition of the Notes and have 'refrained from any comment whatsoever'. It is hardly likely, though for different reasons, that they will have approved of the book.)

[a] The real trouble is not the mere difference of opinion, as between one scholar and another, but the fact that Graves (like myself) refuses to treat his subject as dead. A scholar only feels secure if he is sure that the subject of his study is not one day going to get up and look him between the eyes; and nothing could be in worse taste than a suggestion that anything more is required of him than a chaste rational disinterestedness. Both the Buddha and the White Goddess, it is felt, have been safely dead these two thousand years and more, and the professors of these subjects congratulate themselves on having chosen such admirably extinct fields of study. (Quite the last thing that a professor of Buddhism would dream of doing is to profess Buddhism—that is left to mere amateurs like myself.) But what happens? Here comes Graves and myself shouting out one, that you cannot know the Goddess unless you worship her—and in the flesh, to boot (or, should I say, to buskin?)—, and, the other, that you cannot understand the Buddha unless you practise his teaching—in the jungle, preferably, and barefoot. If I have my way, these comfortable scholars will have to exchange the fleshpots of Oxford for the almsbowl of India; and if Graves has his, their dutiful wives will become Bassarids, dancing naked with Dionysian fury on Boar's Hill, and tearing the Vice-Chancellor to pieces and devouring him raw at the summer solstice. And that would never do, would it?

***
From preface to Notes:

These Notes assume, also, that the reader's sole interest in the Pali Suttas is a concern for his own welfare. The reader is presumed to be subjectively engaged with an anxious problem, the problem of his existence, which is also the problem of his suffering. There is therefore nothing in these pages to interest the professional scholar, for whom the question of personal existence does not arise; for the scholar's whole concern is to eliminate or ignore the individual point of view in an effort to establish the objective truth -- a would-be impersonal synthesis of public facts. The scholar's essentially horizontal view of things, seeking connexions in space and time, and his historical approach to the texts,[1] disqualify him from any possibility of understanding a Dhamma that the Buddha himself has called akālika, 'timeless'.[2] Only in a vertical view, straight down into the abyss of his own personal existence, is a man capable of apprehending the perilous insecurity of his situation; and only a man who does apprehend this is prepared to listen to the Buddha's Teaching. But human kind, it seems, cannot bear very much reality: men, for the most part, draw back in alarm and dismay from this vertiginous direct view of being and seek refuge in distractions. (...)

Existential philosophies, then, insist upon asking questions about self and the world, taking care at the same time to insist that they are unanswerable.[3]

[1] The P.T.S. (London Pali Text Society) Dictionary, for example, supposes that the word attā in the Suttas refers either to a phenomenon of purely historical interest (of the Seventh and Sixth Centuries B.C.) known as a 'soul', or else to the reflexive 'self', apparently of purely grammatical interest. All suggestion that there might be some connexion (of purely vital interest) between 'soul' and 'self' is prudently avoided. 

[2] The scholar's sterile situation has been admirably summed up by Kierkegaard.
Let the enquiring scholar labour with incessant zeal, even to the extent of shortening his life in the enthusiastic service of science; let the speculative philosopher be sparing neither of time nor of diligence; they are none the less not interested infinitely, personally, and passionately, nor could they wish to be. On the contrary, they will seek to cultivate an attitude of objectivity and disinterestedness. And as for the relationship of the subject to the truth when he comes to know it, the assumption is that if only the truth is brought to light, its appropriation is a relatively unimportant matter, something that follows as a matter of course. And in any case, what happens to the individual is in the last analysis a matter of indifference. Herein lies the lofty equanimity of the scholar and the comic thoughtlessness of his parrot-like echo. --- S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. D. F. Swenson, Princeton 1941 & Oxford 1945, pp. 23-24.
And here is Nietzsche.
The diligence of our best scholars, their senseless industry, their burning the candle of their brain at both ends -- their very mastery of their handiwork -- how often is the real meaning of all that to prevent themselves continuing to see a certain thing? Science as self-anaesthetic: do you know that? --- F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay.
And so, in the scholarly article on Tāvatimsa in the P.T.S. Dictionary, we are informed that 'Good Buddhists, after death in this world, are reborn in heaven' -- but we are not told where good scholars are reborn. We do not, naturally, forget what we owe to scholars -- careful and accurate editions, grammars, dictionaries, concordances, all things that wonderfully lighten the task of reading the texts -- and we are duly grateful; but all the science of the scholar does not lead to a comprehensionof the texts -- witness Stcherbatsky's lament: Although a hundred years have elapsed since the scientific study of Buddhism has been initiated in Europe, we are nevertheless still in the dark about the fundamental teachings of this religion and its philosophy. Certainly no other religion has proved so refractory to clear formulation. --- T. Stcherbatsky, The Conception of Buddhist Nirvāna, Leningrad 1927, p. 1

[3]The scholar or scientist, with his objective method, cannot even ask such questions, since on principle he knows and wishes to know nothing of self, and nothing, therefore, of its inseparable correlative, the world. (The world, we must understand, is determined as such only with reference to self; for it is essentially 'what belongs to self', being that in which self is situated and implicated. My world, as Heidegger notes, is the world of my preoccupations and concerns, that is to say an organized perspective of things all significant to me and signifying me. The collection of independent public facts produced by the scientific method is inherently incapable of constituting a world, since it altogether lacks any unifying personal determinant -- which, indeed, it is the business of science to eliminate. Things, not facts, pace Wittgenstein, make up my world.)
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