Parents and children should spend a certain amount of time in each
other’s company during which they do nothing but love each other all
around and have a jolly good time together. It is just as important
for the parents to banish egoistic-social claims for short periods and
actually loaf and fool around with the children as it is for the children
to have a taste of adult idling company. Such, for example, is a real
picnic or camping trip or ocean voyage, or any situation that brings
parents and children together.
§ 205
It is important, too, for every woman to keep clearly separated in her
mind and in her action the two levels, egoistic-social and erotic. Only
then is she in a satisfactory position to become a wife in a higher sense
than that in which most women are wives, and her becoming a mother need
interfere in no way with her remaining a wife to her husband.
It is therefore to the advantage of man to realize that, however much he
may value his wife’s clear intuition in egoistic-social matters, he is
to be sure about their utter exclusion from matters purely erotic. A man
can never fall in love with a conventionally so-called unattractive woman
solely because she has a good business head. If any man should think
so, he would find, on closer analysis, that, if he was really in love,
his motive was truly erotic. If he cannot find any really erotic factor
in his attitude toward her, his union with her can never be a complete
marriage.
He has confused the two levels. He cannot love her _because_ she can
manage a library or a bond broker’s office or an insurance agency, any
more than he can love her really because she knows how to make fudge. He
may be attracted by the fudge. He is undoubtedly attracted unconsciously
by other factors truly erotic in her character. Otherwise he would be
more prudent to marry the fudge rather than the girl.
Similarly if the woman thinks she attracts by her business or culinary
ability she is confusing levels. There are some women who unfortunately,
because erroneously, believe they have little or no erotic attraction.
Plain in face, not well formed, possibly under-weight, complexions not
clear, they think that by sedulously following egoistic-social trends
they can make an appeal to other people and particularly to men. They
fail to see that these trends have hardly anything to do with love,
that, once they love, their form improves, that the homeliest face,
once lighted by the fire of love, has a beauty all its own, pure and
irresistible.
The same is true of unloving, unillumined, unfired men. Judging
erroneously from a confusion of the two levels, they fail to see not only
that erotic trends are the strongest and most universal in the world, but
that being the fundamentally vital trends they are almost inexhaustible
and provide the untapped energy which the egoistic-social thinking of
these diffident men makes them fear to draw upon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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