American essays -- 20th century; Child development; Children; Education
As to the liberty of its loves--the New Race realises that one cannot
be held, except by vulgar hands, where that one does not want to stay.
A mated man and woman turn each other absolutely free, and the first
cry of their liberty is toward one immortal nest. Those firmly caught
in the pure dream are content to wait for each other. They do not
experiment. They realise the long road of romance--a road so long that
the three-score and ten is but a caravansary of the night. They build
above the flesh if for no other reason than to come into the greater
beauty of the flesh. Renouncing nothing, devoted to austerity only for
mystical union, carried away in no abandonment, they seek to achieve
that command of the body by the mind, and that command of the body
and mind by the Soul, which reveals the ultimate truth--that the plan
is for Joy; that the best of all things is for men who have mastered
themselves; that chastity is the breath and inevitable answer to
self-conquest.
The growth of Romance through an ideal mating becomes a fusion at last
of all the loves of earth. Connubial blessedness is therefore more
reverently to be promoted than procreation, for upon it depends the
loveliness of issue. The New Race acts upon the conviction that the
love between man and woman is the holiest of earth expressions, rather
than the love of mother and child. The first contains the second.
Still no earth love is the end.... Built through austerity and
idolatry, through denial and abandon, through madness and martyrdom,
through pettiness and chivalry, through pain turning less and less
slowly through the years to power, through a little zone of peace at
last (the calm before the greater storm) the fervour of man and woman
becomes, in the fullness of time, too strong for earth, and in the
final and keenest pain, the administry of a higher force begins....
I mean to tell this in a queer way through the next three or four
chapters. Straight statements will not contain it quite--for it is
_still_ with dream, as yet. Rather I mean to weave the concept for
you--fold on fold--so that at the end you will have it, as they do who
have listened in Chapel many days.
Flesh is not integrated finely enough to carry the higher ardours
of devotion. If the great saints who have learned to pour out their
souls in adoration to the Father should turn back to a mere physical
expression, they would blast themselves as well as the object of their
madness. The awakening of the higher forces of love lifts the eye of
the adorer from the breast to the brow of the beloved--from the brow to
the Initiatory Star risen at last to meridian.
A new dimension of love is entered upon. All life tells the story.
Watch the big birds lift from the sand to the cushion of wings; watch
the airplane quicken its speed until it lifts from the monorail....
Machinery of racking power in a falling house, is that great love which
has not yet learned to look above the body of the chosen one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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