The _one_ injunction necessary for the too enthusiastically climbing
husband is: There is plenty of time. Sit on this mossy bank. Help your
wife over every stone and stick in the path. Tell her of the grandeur of
the view. There is no hurry provided you both arrive at the top and she
take the final step before you. No aspect of sun, sky, clouds, forest or
lake but is absolutely different after every ascent and superlatively,
nay ecstatically, sublime. This is not the only chance you will have to
climb Chocorua. Mountain climbing, if not too speedy, is good for the
heart, and no expedition so fortifies one for work among the world of men
as this pedestrian ascent into the sky. Only you should go together and
be together all the time. The men who leave their wives on the piazzas
of the hotels in the valley are purely autoerotic boys. No man can tell
in words this mountain-climbing experience.
There may be women who think this mountain climbing immoral, coarse, too
rough for their fine constitution. These will have to be tenderly lifted
up each step of the way but when once at the top will be enthusiastic
converts, for they will have in the panorama an experience they will then
recognize as totally different and distinctively human.
“It has always been common to discuss the psychology of women.
The psychology of men has usually been passed over, whether
because it is too simple or too complicated. But the marriage
question today is much less the wife problem than the husband
problem.”—HAVELOCK ELLIS: _Little Essays of Love and Virtue_,
New York, 1922, p. 75.
CHAPTER VI
CONTROL
§ 128
Evolution has produced in man a being in whom the erotic has now a
greater significance than the egoistic-social impulse. In the development
of plant and animal forms, science recognizes certain new productions
that differ from the norm of the species in which they appear, in such a
way that they were at first called freaks or mutations. But as they breed
true to their form, they are necessarily regarded not as freaks (_lusus
naturæ_), but as well established varieties.
The establishment of the erotic as a norm in humans has the further
implication that here we have a phenomenon existent nowhere else in life,
namely the non-procreative or social love episode.
Indeed it may be that love itself, as distinguished from sensual desire,
is a mutation on the psychical level, a form not recognized in any
description of natural phenomena until late in man’s evolution—the love
that comprises both physical and spiritual reaction for the man, and both
physical and spiritual counter-reaction from the woman. Without this
interaction man cannot be said truly to love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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