Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of LifeDreiser, Theodore
General
Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life
Dreiser, Theodore
American essays -- 20th century
When there is inharmony, schism, and in consequence bitter contention. I
recommend this question, first, to the religious dogmatists of all
creeds; second, to the anarchists, socialists and economic thinkers
generally. They represent purely individual, and to them justifiable,
points of view. Hence the world’s collection of dogmatic and radical
literature.
VI
_What is the key to making marriage do its work in the world?_
???? Unchanging love possibly, or an ingrowing and harmonious sense of
duty. Without Napoleonic skill or tact, however, I fear me much even
then, and so would end with----
???????
P. S. To sum it all up I should like to advance another theory of mine
in regard to the duality of sex. It is quite probable that in the
beginning (biologically speaking) the sexual progenitor of the human
race or of evoluted species contained in itself the full chemical
content of what has since been evoluted into the so-called male and
female. Such being the case its chemical responsiveness to the movements
of the universe, chemical, physical, spiritual, or let us say
emotional, and to its immediate surroundings, was complete in itself. It
was not divided into two sexes and therefore not dependent on any
alienated portion of itself for its chemical, spiritual, emotional or
physical satiation. What happened to it individually and momentarily was
all that could happen to it. It needed no complementary organism, no
other half, to make its understanding of, its reaction to, life
complete. That is not true to-day. Man (male or female) appears to be
individual and complete, but it is an illusion. He is complete and
separate as an organism in everything save his chemical responsiveness
to the universe which requires his union, not merely physically but
spiritually, with his sexual companion to be complete. Their union
sexually, temperamentally, emotionally, intellectually and so on is
required before a full measure of chemical responsiveness to life can be
attained in either. It may seem otherwise in individual cases, but it is
not so. Such being the case (and a world of biological data might be
here introduced), you have the amazing spectacle of love which confounds
all theories of life, which laughs at death, and, in its fullest
expression, defies all human theory and understanding, acting as a _new_
non-understandable thing, and letting in dreams, emotions, conditions
from a deeper world than any we know and whereby this shadow called
existence is resolved, modified, made over into something else so that
it bears no resemblance to its former state. It becomes apparently what
it well may be: a dream and an illusion of beauty or pain or delight, or
all. Evolutionary progress seems to be based on this non-understandable,
mysterious, idealistic reaction and contact which baffles the most
searching suggestions and intuitions of the imagination and leaves us
awed and dumb before the great classics of desire and passion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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