cept the power motive, accept it in deep
responsibility, do you understand me? It is a great life motive. It was
that great dark power-urge which kept Egypt so intensely living for so
many centuries. It is a vast dark source of life and strength in us now,
waiting either to issue into true action, or to burst into cataclysm.
Power--the power-urge. The will-to-power--but not in Nietzsche's sense.
Not intellectual power. Not mental power. Not conscious will-power. Not
even wisdom. But dark, living, fructifying power. Do you know what I
mean?"

"I don't know," said Aaron.

"Take what you call love, for example. In the real way of love, the
positive aim is to make the other person--or persons--happy. It devotes
itself to the other or to others. But change the mode. Let the urge be
the urge of power. Then the great desire is not happiness, neither of
the beloved nor of oneself. Happiness is only one of many states, and it
is horrible to think of fixing us down to one state. The urge of power
does not seek for happiness any more than for any other state. It urges
from within, darkly, for the displacing of the old leaves, the inception
of the new. It is powerful and self-central, not seeking its centre
outside, in some God or some beloved, but acting indomitably from within
itself.

"And of course there must be one who urges, and one who is impelled.
Just as in love there is a beloved and a lover: The man is supposed to
be the lover, the woman the beloved. Now, in the urge of power, it is
the reverse. The woman must submit, but deeply, deeply submit. Not to
any foolish fixed authority, not to any foolish and arbitrary will. But
to something deep, deeper. To the soul in its dark motion of power and
pride. We must reverse the poles. The woman must now submit--but deeply,
deeply, and richly! No subservience. None of that. No slavery. A deep,
unfathomable free submission."

"You'll never get it," said Aaron.

"You will, if you abandon the love idea and the love motive, and if
you stand apart, and never bully, never force from the conscious will.
That's where Nietzsche was wrong. His was the conscious and benevolent
will, in fact, the love-will. But the deep power-urge is not conscious
of its aims: and it is certainly not consciously benevolent or
love-directed.--Whatever else happens, somewhere, sometime, the deep
power-urge in man will have to issue forth again, and woman will submit,
livingly, not subjectedly."

"She nev