What any one of these tasted and rejected women might later be developed
into, in the shape of a full-blooded rich, warm femininity, he has not
the intelligence to conceive. Possibly the cynical roué might say—look at
the older women, are many of them attractive? To which we should reply
no, but the reason they are not is simply that they were not properly
loved into a state of full erotic development, in which they would have
preserved the attractiveness of youth.
§ 87
The only true human love drama is one that has an organic relation to a
whole lifetime of love. To the Don Juan type of ravisher of virgins the
love episode, as part of a life drama with unity in it, does not exist.
He satisfies himself with beginnings, with staking out foundations for
other people to build and live in the homes constructed by their hands,
not realizing, for his imagination is poor and weak, how soon his little
stakes will be pulled up and thrown away by the first workers on the
house, even if they do not entirely reject his plan’s outlines.
The only true love of a man for a woman is that in which he studies her
reactions to his own behaviour, and cultivates that power of his, which
is the innate power residing in any whole man, to control the entire
emotional life of one woman, let her intellectual life be what it may.
“Why,” the man of the world may say, “should any man be satisfied with
only one woman, when, if he has personal attractiveness, he may find
hundreds of women ready to fall into his arms, and may drink the love
life to the dregs?” What Enobarbus said of Cleopatra may be said of any
woman, if she be developed by a man, as she should be.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies....
Woman’s infinite variety, supposed in Shakespeare’s day to have been
embodied in the arch-dispenser of delights, Cleopatra, was a rare
phenomenon; but the modern view is that the variety is present in every
woman, just as the fourscore keys are in every piano. In this sense,
then, woman’s infinite variety is dependent on man’s control of her
emotional reactions, no woman being full woman unless and until she has
been completely manned.
§ 88
No human male, however, can completely man more than one woman, any more
than one gonad can unite with more than one other germ cell. Complete
fusion of two cells requires the entirety of one cell uniting with
the entirety of another. This is the type of physical and psychical
immortality. The union of two single cells contains the potentiality
of development of all the qualities inherent in both, but in new
combinations.
In the psychosomatic union of two individuals there is the same
possibility of infinite variety in the physical and mental reactions,
only if the union between them is, like the fusion of the two single
cells, a complete total and exclusive union each with the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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