Meet Gerald Brenan. Although he came from a solid middle-class Army family, his teen years were influenced by the nearby presence of quite another sort of establishment. The long-haired, bearded vegetarians (and occasional nudists) who populated the local commune believed it was important to either make or grow everything they needed. They were closely monitored by the police, and Gerald's parents told him to stay away from there.

Meanwhile, he discovered both recreational drugs and an aptitude for chemistry, and cooked up batches of belladonna and various other wild-growing substances. He found ways to procure other drugs, domestic and imported, and with an attitude both receptive and responsible, tried them out.

Gerald's parents were concerned about the decor of his room: no carpet; the floor strewn instead with herbs like some medieval banquet hall; bunches of vegetation hung up to dry all over the place. The wall over his bed bore the words Om Mani Padme Hum and the opposite said Aum Shivaya Vashi. There was a picture of the Buddha meditating under a tree, and Gerald's invention, a revolving incense holder that burned three types at the same time. He grew long hair, went for walks at sunrise, and ate strange foods, or fasted.

By the time Gerald reached 17 he was in full rebellion against the bourgeois ethos. He had known for years that formal religion could offer him nothing. He upset his mother by speculating on how Jesus would act if he were to return - specifically, would the Lord put on a military uniform? The whole scene repelled Gerald. "I preferred poverty, misery, sickness, the risk of an early death to that sort of stupefied existence," he later wrote. Stimulated by poetry and his affinity for nature, he had a couple of peak experiences which confirmed his determination to leave home and experience Life.

Then he read Walden, which affected him more than any book before or since. At school he won an essay prize, supposedly a copy of any book he chose. Gerald asked for Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. He was called to the principal's office and told to pick something else.

By this time Gerald was convinced that the wisdom of the Orient was the only kind worth having, and the only knowledge worth attaining, and that he must go there. He also subscribed to the belief that the journey is as important as the destination. "One suffered hardships in crossing mountains and deserts and it was as a result of these hardships, at the culmination of them even, that the moment of illumination came." He got a knife-grinder's cart, figuring he could earn his way as he traveled by sharpening household implements.

That didn't work out, but he did convince a friend to go with him. Each had a little money and sold whatever possessions he could, to get a little more. Carrying a lump of hashish, a few books, and not much else, they set off to walk across Europe in search of the mysterious East. Gerald did not tell his parents he was going, and even wore a disguise for the first few days. The young men made strict rules for themselves: they would give up coffee, tea, and other such stimulants - except for the hash, of course. They would sleep outdoors and keep their diet as elemental as possible.

In Italy they were mistakenly arrested in the course of a murder investigation, but quickly released. In Austria they were arrested on a trumped-up charge and spent some time in jail. What with one thing and another, Gerald decided he wouldn't be able to make it to the Orient. His parents grudgingly sent money, and after a last orgy of hash-smoking and poetry-writing in Italy, he went home.

Gerald's father warily agreed to help him go back to school and try to get into some kind of career, on condition that he give up reading poetry, because its evil influence had started all this rebellion. Gerald caved, but with no intention of keeping his word. Almost immediately he discovered the most influential poet in his life so far - the French hell-raiser Rimbaud. "Here was the gospel of adolescence I had been looking for....All the features of his life - the search for vision, the dabbling in magic, the drugs, the cult of poverty, the determination to harden himself, the pull of the East - had been mine too."

Within a short time Gerald was working on another escape plan, even though it might turn out to be extremely difficult. "It was at such moments, I thought, when face to face with starvation, that the important things happened, that the miracle that changed the course of one's life occurred. At any cost I must lever myself out of the rut of bourgeois comfort and safety in which I had been brought up."

Due to a combination of family pressure and a feeling that, since there was a war on, it might be the right thing to do, he joined the military. There was a sense that "the medicine I needed was Reality." While not quite so attractive as footloose gypsy travel, the war would provide him with opportunities to "burn up the impurities in my nature and become a real and authentic person."

Gerald felt that pacifists, even when on active duty, should be allowed to think and do as they believed right. He also deplored the hate propaganda that emanated from the media back home. War, he felt, was a "plague that afflicted humanity", an evil that made victims out of practically everyone, no matter which side they were on.

His wartime experiences were those of many another recruit - he carried corpses, saw friends blown to pieces before his eyes, suffered the privations of life at the front lines. He had an unusual and significant experience, coming across a group of enemy dead whose possessions had been looted. Everything of value had been taken, but many letters were scattered about. A trained linguist, he was able to read them and concluded that these people "were not our enemies because they had the same feelings as ourselves... this was none of their doing."

However as time wore on and the war seemed even more wicked and senseless, he considered declaring himself a pacifist no matter what fate the resulting court-martial might lead to. He even considered desertion. Around this time a friend brought him a quantity of mescaline which, perhaps due to his depressed state, had no effect. A letter to this friend ran, "Any talk of which side is in the right is altogether beside the question while this dreadful slaughter is going on. At times it makes an impression upon me so dreadful that I cannot express it....I wonder how people can possibly delude themselves that they are following the teaching of Christ." About this time Gerald was wounded, though not seriously, and met up with a group of particularly disgusting officers, one of whom told him there was as much aesthetic pleasure to be gotten from a good dinner and a cigar as from any painting in an art gallery.

The fighting Gerald had been involved in was relatively impersonal, at a distance, and he wondered how he would react in an actual face-to-face, hand-to-hand combat situation. On patrol with two comrades he came upon one of the enemy and found out. Facing death, he started tripping out on a tree, fascinated by how each leaf was a separate entity yet part of the whole, and how he was a separate being yet part of the One...and so on. He was milliseconds away from extinction when one of his friends fired the shot that ended the danger

He lived to be awarded a couple of medals (not for that incident) and took his honorable discharge with the hope that maybe now his parents would stop treating him "like a semi-delinquent child". Out of uniform, readjustment was not simple, and he seems to have suffered a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder. "Only those who have served a term in the Army know how deadening its effect can be and how completely it destroys the roots that connect one with civil life." he wrote. "And war, however deeply it is hated, is a stimulant like alcohol and leaves a lethargy behind it when its powers of arousing excitement are removed." His malaise was increased by a suspicion that his father was disappointed by his return, and would have preferred to have a dead hero in the family. "In those days 'I am proud to have given a son to my country' was a very current phrase."

He hung out for a while with one of the most prominent painters of the time, a wildman whose polygamous marriage and unorthodox living arrangements caused ongoing scandal. There was an ill-considered affair with an emotionally disturbed young woman who did way too many drugs and eventually killed herself. At this point Gerald decided to find a remote cabin, kick back for a while, and read a couple thousand books.

All this sounds like a standard Sixties biography, except for the punch line: Gerald Brenan was born in England 1894. His unauthorized trip to Europe at age 17 took place in 1911; the war in which he enlisted was the one we call World War I, and the enemy was Germany.

But even more to the point, it resembles the biographies of a whole bunch of people alive and active at this moment in history - and during many other moments in history, over large parts of the world, as well as in the future and, according to Norman Spinrad's Child of Fortune, on other planets.

The counterculture is largely a matter of "same stuff, different day." It's always so remarkably similar, you could swear it's the same people, reincarnated over and over again. Just as Gerald discovered similarities between himself and Rimbaud, dissidents in every generation look back and recognize their philosophical forerunners. People who struggle to live on the earth lightly and are conscious of what they use for their own internal fuel. Who are at odds with the authorities on the question of legalized intoxicants. People who need to know they can move around freely, even when they are content to stay. Who know that the trip is as important as what you do when you get there. Who welcome the chance to run around naked, but don't have to; who also tend to attract surveillance whether they do anything wrong or not. People allowed to mingle with the upper strata of their native society, when others of their class can't get in the door. Who acknowledge that there's more to life than meets the eye, even when they don't know exactly what it is. Who, even when in the military, persist in saying what they think. People who feel there should be a pretty tight correlation between the talk and the walk. Who know that, both literally and metaphorically, seduction is classier than rape, and that there are better ways to introduce an idea into someone's mind than to hit the person over the head with it. Who realize how insane the current war is, and hope to stay as far away from it as possible; and who would rather heal, grow and create, than go around interfering with others who never did them any harm. And even some who insist that the world doesn't work unless it works for everybody; and many who believe this would be possible, if only everyone would devote themselves to having higher quality sex and doing more art. They're here. We're here.

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Information on the life of Gerald Brenan was gleaned from the first volume of his autobiography, A Life of One's Own. He went on to become a peripheral figure in the Bloomsbury circle, fall hopelessly in love with artist Dora Carrington, and publish several books.

Pat Hartman published 25 issues of the zine Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics and currently is webslave at Virtual Venice.