this renewal lies the great magic of sex. The life of an
individual goes on apparently the same from day to day. But as a
matter of fact there is an inevitable electric accumulation in the
nerves and the blood, an accumulation which weighs there and broods
there with intolerable pressure. And the only possible means of relief
and renewal is in pure passional interchange. There is and must be a
pure passional interchange from the upper self, as when men unite in
some great creative or religious or constructive activity, or as when
they fight each other to the death. The great goal of creative or
constructive activity, or of heroic victory in fight, _must_ always be
the goal of the daytime self. But the very possibility of such a goal
arises out of the vivid dynamism of the conscious blood. And the blood
in an individual finds its great renewal in a perfected sex circuit.

A perfected sex circuit and a successful sex union. And there can be
no successful sex union unless the greater hope of purposive,
constructive activity fires the soul of the man all the time: or the
hope of passionate, purposive _destructive_ activity: the two amount
religiously to the same thing, within the individual. Sex as an end in
itself is a disaster: a vice. But an ideal purpose which has no roots
in the deep sea of passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And now
we have only these two things: sex as a fatal goal, which is the
essential theme of modern tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadly
parasite. Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy.
There must be the great purposive inspiration always present. But the
automatic ideal-purpose is not even a tragedy, it is a slow
humiliation and sterility.

The great thing is to keep the sexes pure. And by pure we don't mean
an ideal sterile innocence and similarity between boy and girl. We
mean pure maleness in a man, pure femaleness in a woman. Woman is
really polarized downwards, towards the center of the earth. Her deep
positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull. And man is
polarized upwards, towards the sun and the day's activity. Women and
men are dynamically different, in everything. Even in the mind, where
we seem to meet, we are really utter strangers. We may speak the same
verbal language, men and women: as Turk and German might both speak
Latin. But _whatever_ a man says, his meaning is something quite
different and changed when it passes through a woman's ears. And