ll come through the _upper_ channels. This is the secret of our
introversion and our perversion to-day. Anything rather than
spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than
the merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental
element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper
consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our
vice, our dirt, our disease.

And the adult, and the ideal are to blame. But the tragedy of our
children, in their inflamed, solitary sexual excitement, distresses us
beyond any blame.

It is time to drop the word love, and more than time to drop the ideal
of love. Every frenzied individual is told to find fulfillment in
love. So he tries. Whereas, there is no fulfillment in love. Half of
our fulfillment comes _through_ love, through strong, sensual love.
But the central fulfillment, for a man, is that he possess his own
soul in strength within him, deep and alone. The deep, rich aloneness,
reached and perfected through love. And the passing beyond any further
_quest_ of love.

This central fullness of self-possession is our goal, if goal there be
any. But there are two great _ways_ of fulfillment. The first, the way
of fulfillment through complete love, complete, passionate, deep love.
And the second, the greater, the fulfillment through the
accomplishment of religious purpose, the soul's earnest purpose. We
work the love way falsely, from the upper self, and work it to death.
The second way, of active unison in strong purpose, and in faith, this
we only sneer at.

But to return to the child and the parent. The coming to the
fulfillment of single aloneness, through love, is made impossible for
us by the ideal, the monomania of more love. At the very _age
dangereuse_, when a woman should be accomplishing her own fulfillment
into maturity and rich quiescence, she turns rabidly to seek a new
lover. At the very crucial time when she should be coming to a state
of pure equilibrium and rest with her husband, she turns rabidly
against rest or peace or equilibrium or husband in any shape or form,
and demands more love, more love, a new sort of lover, one who will
"understand" her. And as often as not she turns to her son.

It is true, a woman reaches her goal of fulfillment through feeling.
But through being "understood" she reaches nowhere, unless the lover
understands what a vice it is for a woman to get herself and her sex
into her