A PROPOS OF LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER

Lawrence wrote this pamphlet to defend his ‘infamous’ novel in 1929.

Love is the happiness of the world. But happiness is not the whole of fulfillment. Love is a coming together. But there can be no coming together without an equivalent going asunder. In love, all things unite in a oneness of joy and praise. But they could not unite unless they were previously apart. And, having united in a whole circle of unity, they can go no further in love. The motion of love, like a tide, is fulfilled in this instance; there must be an ebb.

So that the coming together depends on the going apart; they systole depends on the diastole; the flow depends upon the ebb. There can never be love universal and unbroken. The sea can never rise to high tide over all the globe at once. The undisputed reign of love can never be.

Because love is strictly a traveling. ‘It is better to travel than to arrive’, somebody has said. This is the essence of unbelief. It is a belief in absolute love, when love is by nature relative. It is a belief in the means, but not in the end. It is strictly a belief in force, for love is a unifying force.

How shall we believe in force? Force is instrumental and functional; it is neither a beginning nor an end. We travel in order to arrive; we do not travel in order to travel. At least, such traveling is mere futility. We travel in order to arrive.

And love is a traveling, a motion, a speed of coming together. Love is the force of creation, but all force, spiritual or physical, has its polatity, its positive and its negative. All things that fall, fall by gravitation to the earth. But has not the earth, in the opposite of gravitation, cast off the moon and held her at bay in our heavens during all the aeons of time?

So with love. Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy creation. But if all be united in one bond of love, then there is no more love. And therefore, for those who are in love with love, to travel is better than to arrive. For in arriving one passes beyond love, or, rather, one encompasses love in a new transcendence. To arrive is the supreme joy after all our traveling.

The bond of love! What worse bondage can we conceive than the bond of love? It is an attempt to wall in the high tide; it is a will to arrest the spring, never to let May dissolve into June, never to let the hawthorn petal fall for the berrying.

This has been our idea of immortality, this infinite of love, love universal and triumphant. And what is this but a prison and a bondage? What is eternity but the endless passage of time? What is infinity but an endless progressing through space? Eternity, infinity, our great ideas of rest and arrival, what are they but ideas of less traveling through space; no more, however we try to argue it. And immortality, what is it, in our idea, but an endless continuing in the same sort? A continuing, a living for ever, a lasting and enduring for ever- what is this but traveling? An assumption into heaven, a becoming one with God- what is the infinite on arrival? The infinite is no arrival. When we come to find exactly what we mean by God, by the infinite, by our immortality, it is a meaning of endless continuing in the same line and in the same sort, endless traveling in one direction. This is infinity, endless traveling in one direction. And the God of Love is our idea of the progression ad infinitum of the force of love. Infinity is no arrival. It is as much a culde- sac as is the bottomless pit. And what is the infinity of love but a cul-de-sac or a bottomless pit?

Love is a progression towards the goal. Therefore it is a progression away from the opposite goal. Love travels heavenwards. What then does love depart from? Hellwards, what is there? Love is at last a positive infinite. What then is the negative infinite? Positive and negative infinite are the same, since there is only one infinite. Hwo the will it matter if we travel heavenwards, ad infinitum, or in the opposite direction, to infinity? Since the infinity abstained is the same in either case, the infinite of pure homogeneity, which is nothingness, or everythingness, it does not matter which.

Infinity, the infinite, is no goal. It is a cul-de-sac, or, in another sense, it is the bottomless pit. To fall down the bottomless pit is to travel for ever. And a pleasant-walled cul-de-sac may be a perfect heaven. But to arrive in a sheltered, paradisiacal cul-de-sac of peace and unblemished happiness, this will not satisfy us. And to fall for ever down the bottomless pit of progression, this will not do either.

Love is not a goal; it is only a traveling. Likewise death is not a goal; it is a traveling asunder into elemental chaos. And from the elemental chaos all is cast forth again into creation. Therefore death also is but a cul-de-sac, a meltingpot.

There is a goal, but the goal is neither love nor death. It is a goal neither infinite nor eternal. It is the realm of calm delight, it is the other-kingdom of bliss. We are like a rose, which is a miracle of pure centrality, pure absolved equilibrium. Balanced in perfection in the midst of time of time and space, the rose is perfect in the realm of perfection, neither temporal, but absolved by the quality of perfection, pure immanence of absolution.

We are creatures of time and space. But we are like a rose; we accomplish perfection, we arrive in the absolute. We are creatures of time and space, perfection in the realm of the absolute, the other- world of bliss.

And love, love is encompassed and surpassed. Love always has been encompassed and surpassed by the fine lovers. We are like a rose, a perfect arrival.

Love is manifold, it is not of one sort only. There is the love between man and woman, scared and profane. There is Christian love, ‘thou shalt love thy neithbour as thyself.’ And there is the love of God. But always love is a joining together.

Only in the conjunction of man and woman has love kept a duality of meaning. Sacred love and profane love, they are opposed, and yet they are both love. The love between man and woman is the greatest and most complete passion the world will ever see, because it is dual, because it is of two opposing kinds. The love between man and woman is the perfect heart- beat of life, systole, diastole.

Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her. But whole love between man and woman is sacred and profane together. Profane love seeks its own. I seek my own in the beloved, I wrestle with her to wrest it from her. We are not clear, we are mixed and mingled. I am in the beloved also, and she is in me. Which should not be, for this is confusion and chaos. Therefore I will gather myself complete and free from the beloved, she shall single herself out in utter contradistinction to me. There is twilight in our souls, neither light nor dark. The light must draw itself together in purity, the dark must stand on the other hand; they must be two complete in opposition, neither one partaking of the other, but each single in its own stead.

We are like a rose. In the pure passion for oneness, in the pure passion for distinctness and separateness, a dual passion of unutterable separation and lovely conjunction of the two, the new configuration takes place, the transcendence, the two in their perfect singleness, transported into one surpassing heaven of a rose blossom.

But the love between a man and woman, when it is whole, is dual. It is the melting into pure communion, and it is the friction of sheer sensuality, both. In pure communion I become whole in love. And in pure, fierce passion of sensuality I am burned into essentiality. I am driven from the matrix into sheer separate distinction. I become my single self, inviolable and unique, as the gems were perhaps once driven into themselves out of the confusion of earths. The woman and I, we are the confusion of earths. Then in the fire of their extreme sensual love, in the friction of intense, destructive flame, I am destroyed and reduced to her essential otherness. It is a destructive fire, the profane love. But it is the only fire that will purify us into singleness, fuse us from the chaos into our won unique gem-like separateness of being.

All whole love between man and woman is thus dual, a love which is the motion of melting, fusing together into oneness, and a love which is the intense, frictional, and sensual gratification of being burnt down, burnt apart into separate clarity of being, unthinkable otherness and separateness. But not all love between man and woman is whole. It may be all gentle, the merging into oneness, like St Francis and St Clare, or Mary of Bethany and Jesus. There may be no separateness discovered, no singleness won, no unique otherness admitted. This is a half love, what is called sacred love. And this is the love which knows the purest happiness. On the other hand, the love may be all a lovely battle of sensual gratification, the beautiful but deadly counterposing of male against female, as Tristan and Isoled. These are the lovers that top the sum of pride, they go with the grandest banners they are the gemlike beings, he pure male singled and separated out in superb jewel- like isolation of arrogant manhood, she purely woman, a lily balanced in rocking pride of beauty and perfume of womanhood. This is the profane love, that ends in flamboyant and lacerating tragedy when the two which are so singled out are torn finally apart by death. But if profane love ends in piercing tragedy, none the less the sacred love ends in a poignant yearning and exquisite submissive grief. St Francis dies and leaves St Clare to her pure sorrow.

There must be two in one, always two in one- the sweet love of communion and the fierce, proud love of sensual fulfillment, both together in one love. And then we are like a rose. We surpass even love, love is encompassed and surpassed. We are two who have a pure connexion. We are two, isolated like gems in our unthinkable otherness. But the rose contains and transcends us, we are one rose, beyond.

Now sex and beauty are one thing, like flame and fire. If you hate sex you hate beauty. If you love living beauty, you have a reverence for sex. Of course you can love old, dead beauty and hate sex. But to love living beauty you must have a reverence for sex.

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.

Sex is the root of which intuition is the foliage and beauty the flower. Why is a woman lovely, if ever, in her twenties? It is the time when sex rises softly to her face, as a rose to the top of a rose bush.

And the appeal is the appeal of beauty. We deny it wherever we can. We try to make the beauty as shallow and trashy as possible. But, first and foremost, sex appeal is the appeal of beauty.

Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is that our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.

What sex is, we don’t know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty.

But while we are fully alive, the fire of sex smoulders or burns in us. In youth it flickers and shines; in age it glows softer and stiller, but there it is. We have some control over it; but only partial control. That is why society hates it.

Handsome, good- looking, but not lovely, not beautiful. Handsome and good- looking women are the women with good features and the right hairs. But a lovely woman is an experience. It is a question of communicated fire. It is a question of sex appeal in our poor, dilapidated modern phraseology.

One may be at war with society, and with man, and still keep one’s deep peace with mankind. It is not pleasant to be at war with society, but sometimes it is the only way of preserving one’s peace of soul, which is peace with the living, struggling, real mankind. And this latter one cannot afford to lose.

The result of forcing any feeling is the death of that feeling, and the substitution of some sort of opposite. Whitman insisted on sympathizing with everything and everybody: so much so, that he came to believe in death only, not just his own death, but the death of all people.

As matter of fact, the young are becoming afraid of their own emptiness. It’s awful fun throwing things out of window. But when you’ve thrown everything out, and you’ve spent two or three days sitting on the bare floor, your bones begin to ache, and you begin to wish for some of the old furniture, even if it was the ugliest Victorian horsehair.

At least, that’s how it seems to me the young women begin to feel. They are frightened at the emptiness of their house of life, now they’ve thrown everything out of the window. Their young Philips and Peters and so on don’t seem to make the slightest move to put any new introduce is a cocktail- shaker and perhaps a wireless set. For the rest, it can stay blank.

And the young women begin to feel a little uneasy. Women don’t like to feel empty. A woman hates to feel that she believes in nothing and stands for nothing. Let her be the silliest woman on earth, she will take something seriously: her appearance, her clothes, her house, something. And let her be not so very silly, and she wants more than that. She wants to feel, instinctively, that she amounts o something and that her life stands for something. Women, who so often are angry with men because men cannot ‘just live’, but must always be wanting some purpose in life. It seems to me that in a woman the need to feel that her life means something, stands for something, and amounts to something is much more imperative than in a man. The woman herself may deny it emphatically; because, of course, it is the man’s business to supply her life with this ‘purpose’. But a man can be tramp, purposeless, and be happy. Not so a woman. It is a very, very rare woman who can be happy if she feels herself ‘outside’ the great purpose of life. Whereas, I verily believe, vast numbers of men would gladly drift away as wasters, if there were anywhere to drift to.

A woman cannot bear to feel empty and purposeless. But a man may take a real pleasure in that feeling. A man can take real pride and satisfaction in pure negation: ‘I am quite empty of feeling, I don’t care the slightest bit in the world for anybody or anything except myself. But I do care for myself, and I’m going to survive in spite of them all, and I’m going to have my own success without caring the least they are, even if I’m weak. I must build myself proper protections, and entrench myself, and them I’m safe. I can sit inside my glass tower and feel nothing and be touched by nothing, and yet exert my power, my will, through the glass walls of my ego.’

That, roughly, is the condition of a man who accepts the condition of true egoism, and emptiness, in himself. He has a certain pride in the condition, since in pure emptiness of real feeling he can still carry out his ambition, his will to egoistic success.

Now I doubt if any woman can feel like this. The most egoistic woman is always in a tangle of hate, if not of love. But the true male egoist neither hates nor loves, he is quite empty, at the middle of him. Only on the surface he has feelings: and these he is always trying to get away from. Inwardly, he feels nothing. And when he feels nothing, he exults in his ego and knows he is safe. Safe, within his fortifications, inside his glass tower.

But I doubt if women can even understand this condition in a man. They mistake the emptiness for depth. They think the false calm of the egoist who really feels nothing, is strength. And they imagine that all the defences which the confirmed egoist throws up, the glass tower of imperviousness, are screens to a real man, a positive being. And they throw themselves madly on the defences, to tear them down and come at the real man, little knowing that there is no real man, the defences are only there to protect a hollow emptiness, an egoism, not a human man.

But the young are beginning to suspect. The young women are beginning to respect the defences, for they are more afraid of coming upon the ultimate nothingness of the egoist, than of leaving him undiscovered. Hollowness, nothingness- it frightens the woman. They cannot be real nihilists. But men can. Men can have a savage of sheer negative emptiness, when there is nothing left to throw out of the window, and the window is sealed.

Women wanted freedom. The result is a hollowness, an emptiness which frightens the stoutest heart. Women then turn to women for love. But that doesn’t last. It can’t. whereas the emptiness persists and persists.

The love of humanity is gone, leaving a great gap. The cosmic consciousness has collapsed upon a great void. The egoist sits grinning furtively in the triumph of his own emptiness. And now what is woman going to do? Now that the house of life is empty, now that she’s thrown all the emotional furnishing out of the window, and the house of life, which is her eternal home, is empty as a tomb, now what is dear forlorn woman going to do?

“To me, dancing,” said Romeo, “is just making love to music.”

“That’s why you never will dance with me, I suppose,” relied Juliet.

“Well, you know, you are a bit too much of an individual.”

And really, surely this is all to the good. If the young don’t really like copulation, then they are safe. As for marriage, they will marry, according to their grandmothers’ dream, for quite other reasons. Our grandfathers, or great- grandmothers, married crudely and unmusically, for copulation. That was the actuality. So the dream was all of music. The dream was the mating of two souls, to the faint chiming of the Seraphim. We, the third and fourth generation, we are the dream made flesh. They dreamed of a marriage with all things gross- meaning especially copulation- left out, and only the pure harmony of equality and intimate companionship remaining. And the young live out the dream. They marry: they copulate in a perfunctory and halfdisgusted fashion, merely to show they can do it. And so they have children. But the marriage is made to music, the gramophone and the wireless orchestrate each small domestic art, and keep up the jazzing jig of connubial felicity, a felicity of companionship, equality, forbearance, and mutual sharing of everything the married couple have in common. Marriage set to music! The worn- out old serpent in this musical Eden of domesticity is the last, feeble instinct for copulation, which drives the married couple to clash upon the boring organic differences in one another, and prevents them from being twin souls in almost identical bodies. But we are wise and soon learn to leave the humiliating act out altogether. It is the only wisdom.

To the music one should dance, and dancing, dance. The Etruscan young woman is going gaily at it, after two thousand five hundred years. She is not making love to music, nor is the dark- limbed youth, her partner. She is just dancing her very soul into existence, having made an offering on one hand to the lively phallus of man, on the other hand, to the shut womb- symbol of woman, and put herself on real good terms with both of them. So she is quite serene, and dancing herself as a very fountain of motion and of life, young man opposite her dancing himself the same, in contrast and balance, with just the double flute to whistle round their naked heels.

And I believe this is, or will be, the dream of our pathetic, music- stunned young girl of today, and the substance of her children’s children, unto the third and fourth generation.

The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it’s because she doesn’t quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man’s picture of woman to live up to.

For, of course, just as there are many men in the world, there are many masculine theories of what women should be. But men run to type, and it is the type, not the individual, that produces the theory, or ‘ideal ’ of woman. Those very grasping gentry, the Romans, produced a theory or ideal of the matron, which fitted in very nicely with the Roman property lust. ‘Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion.’ – So Caesar’s wife kindly proceeded to be above it, no matter how far below it the Caesar fell. Later gentlemen like Nero produced the ‘fast theory of woman, and later ladies were fast enough for everybody. Dante arrived with a chaste and untouched Beatrice, and chaste and untouched Beatrices began to march self-importantly through the centuries. The Renaissance discovered the learned woman, and learned women buzzed mildly into verse and prose. Dickens invented the child-wife, so child- wives have swarmed ever since. He also fished out his version of the chaste Beatrice, a chaste but marriageable Agnes. George Eliot imitated this pattern, and it became confirmed. The noble woman, the pure spouse, the devoted mother took the field, and was simply worked to death. Our own poor mothers were this sort. So we younger men, having been a bit frightened of our noble mothers, tended to revert to the child- wife. We weren’t very inventive. Only the child- wife must be a boyish little thing- that was the new touch we added. Because young men are definitely frightened of the real female. She’ s too risky a quantity. She is too untidy, like David’s Dora. No, let her be a boyish little thing, it’s safer. So a boyish little thing she is.’

There are, of course, other types. Capable men produce the capable woman ideal. Doctors produce the capable nurse. Business the capable secretary. And so you get all sorts. You can produce the masculine sense of honour in women, if you want to. There is also the eternal secret ideal of men- the prostitute. Lots of women live up to this idea, just because men want them to.

And so, poor woman, destiny makes away with her. It isn’t that she hasn’t got a mind- she has. She’s got everything that man has. The only difference is that she asks for a pattern. Give me a pattern to follow! That will always be woman’s cry. Unless of course she has already chosen her pattern quite young, them she will declare she is herself absolute, and no man’s idea of women has any influence over her.

Now the real tragedy is not that women ask and must ask for a pattern of womanhood. The tragedy is not, even, that men give them such abominable patterns, child- wives, little- boy- baby= face girls, perfect secretaries, noble spouses, self-sacrificing mothers, pure women who bring forth children in virgin coldness, prostitutes who just make themselves low, to please men; all the atrocious patterns of womanhood that men have supplied to woman; patterns all perverted from any real natural fullness of a human being. Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby- face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopedia, an ideal, or an obscenity; the one thing he won’ t accept her as, is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

And, of course, women love living up to strange pattern, weird patterns- the more uncanny the better. What could be more uncanny than the present pattern of the Eton- boy girl with flower- like artificial complexion? It is just weird. And for its very weirdness women like living up to it. what can be more gruesome than the little- boy- face pattern? Yet the girls take it on the avidity.

What a man has to do to- today is to admit, at last, that all these fixed ideas are no good. As a fixed object, even as an individuality or a personality, no human being, so they may as well leave it alone. As soon as anybody, a man or woman, becomes a great I AM, he becomes nothing. Man or woman, each is a flow, a flowing life. And without one another, we can’t flow , just as a river cannot flow without banks. A woman is one bank of the river of my life, and the world is the other. Without the two shores, my life would be a marsh. It is the relationship to woman, and to my fellow men, which makes me myself a river of life. And it is this, even, that gives me my soul. A man who has never had a vital relationship to any other human being doesn’t really have a soul. We cannot feel that Immanuel Kant ever had a soul. A soul is something that forms and fulfills itself in my contacts, my living touch with people I have loved or hated or truly know. I am born with the clew to my soul. The wholeness of my soul I must achieve. And by my soul I mean my wholeness. What we suffer from today is the lack of a sense of our own wholeness, or completeness, which is peace. What we lack, what the young lack, is a sense of being whole in themselves. They feel so scrappy, they have no peace. And by peace I don’t mean inertia, but the flowing of life, like a river.

We lack peace because we are not whole. And we are not whole because we have known only a tithe of the vital relationships we might have had, we live in an age which believes in stripping away the relationship. Strip them away, like an onion, till you come to pure, or blank nothingness. Emptiness. That is where most men have come now: to a knowledge of their own complete emptiness. They wanted so badly to be ‘themselves’ that they became nothing at all: or next to nothing.

It is not much fun, being next to nothing. And life ought to be fun, the greatest fun, not merely ‘having a good time,’ in order to ‘get away from yourself.’ But real fun in being yourself. Now there are two great relationships possible to human beings: the relationship of man to woman, and the relationship of man to man. As regards both, we are in a hopeless mess.

And what is sex, after all, but the symbol of the relation of man to woman, woman to man? And the relation of man to woman is wide as all life. It consists in infinite different flows between the two beings, different, even apparently contrary. Chastity is part of the flow between man and woman, as to physical passion. And beyond these, an infinite range of subtle communication which we know nothing about. I should say that the relation between any two decently married people changes profoundly every few years, often without their knowing anything about it; though every change causes pain, even if it brings a certain joy. The long course of marriage is a long event perpetual change, in which a man and a woman mutually build up their souls and make themselves whole. It is like rivers flowing on, though new country, always unknown.

But we are so foolish, and fixed by our limited ideas. A man says: ‘ I don’t love my wife any more, I no longer want to sleep with her.’ But why should he always want to sleep with her? How does he know what other subtle and vital interchange is going on between him and her, making them both whole, in this period when he doesn’t want to sleep with her? And she, instead of jibbing and saying that all is over and she must find another man and get a divorce- why doesn’t she pause, and listen for a new rhythm in her soul, and look for the new movement in the man ? with every change, a new being emerges, a new rhythm, establishes itself; we renew our life as we grow older, and there is real peace. Why oh, why do we want one another to be always the same, fixed, like a menu card that is never changed?

If only we had more sense. But we are held by a few fixed ideas, like sex, money, what a person “ought” to be, and so forth, and we miss the whole of life. Sex is a changing thing, now alive, now quiescent, fiery, now apparently quite gone, quite gone. But the ordinary man and woman haven’t the gumption to take it in all its changes. They demand crass, crude sex- desire, they demand it always, and when it isn’t forthcoming, then- smash- bash! Smash up the whole show. Divorce! Divorce!

However! We take it, I assume, that pornography is something base, something unpleasant. In short, we don’t like it. and why don’t we like it? Because it arouses sexual feelings?

I think not. No matter how hard we may pretend otherwise, most of us rather like a moderate rousing of our sex. It warms us, stimulates us like sunshine on a grey day. After a century or two of Puritanism, this is still true of most people. Only the mob-habit of condemning any form of sex is too strong to let us admit it naturally. And there are, of course, many people who are genuinely repelled by the simplest and most natural stirrings of sexual feeling. But these people are perverts who have fallen into hatred of their fellow men: thwarted, disappointed, unfulfilled people, of whom, alas, our civilization contains so many. And they nearly always enjoy some unsimple and unnatural form of sex excitement, secretly.

The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved. Today, modesty is thrown to the wind, even in the presence of the grey guardians. But secrecy is hugged, being a vice in itself. And the attitude of the grey ones is: Dear young ladies, you may abandon all modesty, so long as you hug your dirty little secret.

This ‘dirty little secret ’ has become infinitely precious to the mob of people today. It is a kind of hidden sore or inflammation which, when rubbed or scratched, gives off sharp thrills that seem delicious. So the dirty little secret is rubbed and scratched more and more, till it becomes more and more secretly inflamed, and the nervous and psychic health of the individual is more and more impaired. One might easily say that half the love novels and half the love films today depend entirely for their success on the secret rubbing of the dirty little secret. You can call this sex excitement if you like, but it is sex excitement of a secretive, furtive sort, quite special. The pain and simple excitement, quite open and wholesome, which you find in some Boccaccio stories is not for a minute to be confused with the furtive excitement aroused by rubbing the dirty little secret in all secrecy in modern best- sellers. This furtive, sneaking, cunning rubbing of an inflamed spot in the imagination is the very quick of modern pornography, and it is a beastly and very dangerous thing. You can’t so easily expose it, because of its very furtiveness and its sneaking cunning. So the cheap and popular modern love novel and love film flourishes and is even praised by moral guardians, because you get the snaking thrill fumbling under all the purity of dainty underclothes, without one single gross word to let you know what is happening.

Then secondly, in his adventure of self- consciousness a man must come to the limits of himself and become aware of something beyond him. A man must be self- conscious enough to know his own limits, and to be aware of that which surpasses him. What surpasses me is the very urge of life that is within me, and this life urges me to forge myself and to yield to the stirring half- born impulse to smash up the vast lie of the world, and make a new world. If my life is merely to go on in a vicious circle of self enclosure, masturbation self- consciousness, it is worth nothing to me. If my individual life is to be enclosed within the huge corrupt lie of society today, purity and the dirty little secret, then it is worth not much to me. Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies. It is first, freedom from lies. It is first, freedom from myself, from the lie of myself, from the lie of my all importance, even to myself; it is freedom from the self- conscious masturbating thing I am, self- enclosed. And second, freedom from the vast lie of the social world, the lie of purity and the dirty little secret. And the other monstrous lies under the cloak of this one primary lie. The monstrous lie of money lurks under the cloak of purity. Kill the purity lie, and the money lie will be defenceless.

And that is the whole point. We are today, as today, as human beings, evolved and cultured for far beyond the taboos which are inherent in our culture. This is a very important fact to realize. Probably, to the Crusaders, mere words were potent and evocative to a degree we can’t realize. The evocative power of the so- called obscene words must have been very dangerous to the dim- minded, obscure, violent natures of the Middle Ages, and perhaps is still too strong for slow- minded, half- evoked lower today. But real culture makes us give to a word only those mental and imaginative reactions which belong to the mind, and savers us from violent and indiscriminate physical functions, without getting all messed up with physical reactions that overpowered him. It is no longer so. Culture and civilization have taught us to separate the reactions. We now know the act does not necessarily follow on the thought. In fact, thought and action, word and deed, are two separate forms of consciousness, two separate lives which we lead. We need, very sincerely, to keep a connection. But while we in thought we cannot really act, and while we are in action we cannot really think. The two conditions, of thought and action, are mutually exclusive. Yet they should be related in harmony.

Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between them, and each has a natural respect for the other.

And it is obvious, there is no balance and no harmony now. the body is at the best the tool of the mind, at the worst, the toy. The business man keeps himself ‘fit,’ that is, keeps his body in good working order, for the sake of his business, and the usual young person who spends much time on keeping fit does so as a rule out of self- conscious self – absorption, narcissism. The mind has a stereotyped set of ideas and ‘feelings,’ and the body is made to act up, like a trained dog: to beg for sugar, whether it wants sugar or whether it doesn’t, to shake hands when it would dearly like to snap the hand it has to shake. The body of men and women today is just a trained dog. And of no one is this more true than of the free and emancipated young. Above all, their bodies are the bodies of trained dogs. And because the dog is trained to do things the old- fashioned dog never did, they call themselves free, full of real life, the real thing.

But they know perfectly well it is false. Just as the business man knows, somewhere, that he’s all wrong. Men and women aren’t really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent. The body is, in its spontaneous natural self, dead or paralysed. It has only the secondary life of a circus dog, acting up and showing off: and then collapsing.

What life could it have, of itself? the body’s life is the life of sensations and emotions. The body feels real hunger, real thirst, real joy in the sun or the snow, real pleasure in the smell of roses or the look of a lilac bush; real anger, real sorrow, real love, real tenderness, real warmth, real passion, real hate, real grief. All the emotions belong to the body, and are only feel a mental excitement. Then, hours after, perhaps in sleep, the awareness may reach the bodily centres, and true grief wrings the heart.

Our education from the start has taught us a certain range of emotions, what to feel and what not to feel, and how to feel the feelings we allow ourselves to feel. All the rest is just non- existent.

But especially in love, only counterfeit, from parents exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don’t trust anybody with your real emotions: if you’ve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.

I believe there has never been an age of greater mistrust between persons than ours today: under a superficial but quite genuine social trust. Very few of my friends would pick my pocket, or let me sit on a chair where I might hurt myself. But practically all my friends would turn my real emotions to ridicule. They can’t each implies a fundamental emotional sympathy. And hence, counterfeit love, which there is no escaping.

And with counterfeit emotions there is no real sex at all. Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle. Once come down to sex, and the emotional swindle must collapse. But in all the approaches to sex, the emotional swindle intensifies more and more. Till you get there. Then collapse.

Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love. The peculiar hatred of people who have not loved one another, but who have pretended to, even perhaps have imagined they really did love, is one of the phenomena of our time. The phenomenon, of course, belongs to all time. But today it is almost universal. People who thought they loved one another dearly, dearly, and went on for years, ideal: lo! Suddenly the most profound and vivid hatred appears. If it doesn’t come out fairly young, it saves itself till the happy couple are nearing fifty, the time of the great sexual change- and then- cataclysm!

Nothing is more startling. Nothing is more staggering, in our age, than the intensity of the hatred people, men and women, feel for one another when they have once ‘loved’ one another. It breaks out in the most extraordinary ways. And when you know people intimately, it is almost universal. It is the charwoman as much as the mistress, and the duchess as much as the policeman’s wife.

Now the real tragedy is here: that we are none of us all of a piece, none of us all counterfeit, or all true love. And in many a marriage, in among the counterfeit there flickers a little flame of the true thing, on both sides. The tragedy is, that in an age peculiarly conscious of counterfeit, peculiarly suspicious of substitute and swindle in emotion, particularly sexual emotion, the rage and mistrust against the counterfeit element is likely to overwhelm and extinguish the small, true flame of real loving communion, which might have made two lives happy. Herein lies the danger of harping only on the counterfeit and the swindle of emotion, as most ‘advanced’ writers do. Though they do it, of course, to counterbalance the hugely greater swindle of the sentimental ‘sweet’ writers.

Now when brilliant young people like this talk to me about sex: or scorn to: I say nothing. There is nothing to say. But I feel a terrible weariness. To them sex means, just plainly and simply, a lady’s underclothing, and the fumbling therewith. They have read all the love literature, Anna Karenina, all the rest, and looked at to today, sex means to them meaningless young women and expensive underthings. Whether they are young men from Oxford, or working- men, it is the same.

The woman exposes her flesh more and more, and the more she exposes, the more men are sexually repelled by her. But let us not forget that the men are socially thrilled, while sexually repelled.

But we are very mixed, all of us, and creatures of many diverse and often opposing desires, the very men who encourage women to be most daring and sexless complain most bitterly of the sexlessness of women. The same the women. the women who adore men so tremendously for their social smartness and sexlessness as males, hate them most bitterly for not being ‘men.’ But at certain hours in their lives, all individuals hate counterfeit sex with deadly and maddened hate, and those who have dealt it out most perhaps have the wildest hate of it, in the other person- or persons.

  But when women’s flesh arouses no sort of desire, something is specially wrong! Something is sadly wrong. For the naked arms of women today asrouses a feeling of flippancy, cynicism,a dn vulgarity which is indeed the very last feeling to go to church with, if you have any respect for the Church. The bare arms of women in an Italian church are really a mark of disrespect, given the tradition.

  Now this question of sex and marriage is of paramount importance. Our social life is established on marriage, and marriage, the sociologists say, is established upon property. Marriage has found the best- method of conserving property and stimulating production. Which is all there is to it.

For my part, I have to say NO! every time. And having said it, we have to come back and consider the famous saying, that perhaps the greatest contribution to the social life of man made by Christianity is- marriage. Christianity brought marriage into the world: marriage as we know it. Christianity established the little autonomy of the family within the greater rule of the State. Christianity made marriage in some respects inviolate, not to be violated by the State. It is marriage, perhaps, which has given man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the State, given him his foothold of independence on which to stand and resist an unjust State. Man and wife, a king and queen with one or two subjects, and a few square yards of territory of their own: this, really, is marriage. It is true freedom because it is a true fulfillment, for man, woman, and children.

And the Church created marriage by making it a sacrament, a sacrament of man and woman united in the sex communion, and never to be separated, except by death. And even when separated by death, still not freedom the marriage. Marriage, as far as the individual went, eternal. Marriage, making one complete body out of two incomplete ones, and providing for the complex development of the man’s soul and the woman’s soul in unison, throughout a life- time. Marriage sacred and inviolable, the great way of earthly fulfillment for man and woman, in unison, under the spiritual rule of the Church.

This is Christianity’s great contribution to the life of man, and it is only too easily overlooked. Is it, or is it not, a great step in the direction of life- fulfillment of man and woman, or is it a frustration? It is a very important question indeed, and every man and woman must answer it.

But supposing I am neither bent on saving my own soul nor other people’s souls? Supposing Salvation seems incomprehensible to me, as I confess it does? ‘being saved’ seems to me just jargon, the jargon of self- conceit. Supposing, then, that I cannot see this Saviour and Salvation stuff, supposing that I see the soul as something which must be developed and fulfilled, to the very end; what then?

The rhythm of life itself was preserved by the Church hour by hour, day by day, season by season, year by year, epoch by epoch, down among the people, and the wild coruscations were accommodated to this permanent rhythm. We feel it, in the south , in the country, when we hear the jangle of the bells at dawn, at noon, at sunset, making the hours with the sound of mass or prayers. It is the rhythm of the daily sun. We feel it in the John’s Day, all Saints, all Souls. This is the wheeling of the year, the movement of the sun through solstice and equinox, the coming of the seasons, the sadness of Lent, the delight of Easter, the wonder of Pentecost, the fires of St. John, the candles on the graves of All Souls, the lit- up tree of Christmas, all representing kindled rhythmic emotions in the souls of men and women. And men experience the great rhythm of emotion man- wise, women experience it womanwise, and in the unison of men and women it is complete.

Augustine said that God created the universe new every day: and to the living, emotion soul this is true. Every dawn dawns upon an entirely new universe, every Easter light up an entirely new glory of a new world opening in utterly new flower. And the soul of man and the soul of woman is in the same way, with the infinite delight of life and the ever- newness of life. So a man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life- time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year.