--well, it just makes
one sick. It is disastrous to the deep sexual life. But perhaps that
is what we want.

When humanity comes to its senses it will realize what a fearful Sodom
apple our understanding is. What terrible mouths and stomachs full of
bitter ash we've all got. And then we shall take away "knowledge" and
"understanding," and lock them up along with the rest of poisons, to
be administered in small doses only by competent people.

We have almost poisoned the mass of humanity to death with
_understanding_. The period of actual death and race-extermination is
not far off. We could have produced the same barrenness and frenzy of
nothingness in people, perhaps, by dinning it into them that every man
is just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. Our "understanding,"
our science and idealism have produced in people the same strange frenzy
of self-repulsion as if they saw their own skulls each time they looked
in the mirror. A man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect and
biological process, draped in an ideal, is he? No wonder he sees the
skeleton grinning through the flesh.

Our leaders have not loved men: they have loved ideas, and have been
willing to sacrifice passionate men on the altars of the
blood-drinking, ever-ash-thirsty ideal. Has President Wilson, or Karl
Marx, or Bernard Shaw ever felt one hot blood-pulse of love for the
working man, the half-conscious, deluded working man? Never. Each of
these leaders has wanted to abstract him away from his own blood and
being, into some foul Methuselah or abstraction of a man.

And me? There is no danger of the working man ever reading my books,
so I shan't hurt him that way. But oh, I would like to save him alive,
in his living, spontaneous, original being. I can't help it. It is my
passionate instinct.

I would like him to give me back the responsibility for general
affairs, a responsibility which he can't acquit, and which saps his
life. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for the
future. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for
thought, for direction. I wish we could take hope and belief together.
I would undertake my share of the responsibility, if he gave me his
belief.

I would like him to give me back books and newspapers and theories.
And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and
rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.

CHAPTER X

PARENT LOVE

In the serious hou