a wife.

Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she _believes_ in
you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. Then, how
wonderful this nightfall is! How rich you feel, tired, with all the
burden of the day in your veins, turning home! Then you too turn to
your other goal: to the splendor of darkness between her arms. And you
know the goal is there for you: how rich that feeling is. And you feel
an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in
your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification
of her embrace. That's what it is to have a wife.

But no man ever had a wife unless he served a great predominant
purpose. Otherwise, he has a lover, a mistress. No matter how much she
may be married to him, unless his days have a living purpose,
constructive or destructive, but a purpose beyond her and all she
stands for; unless his days have this purpose, and his soul is really
committed to his purpose, she will not be a wife, she will be only a
mistress and he will be her lover.

If the man has no purpose for his days, then to the woman alone
remains the goal of her nights: the great sex goal. And this goal is
no goal, but always cries for the something beyond: for the rising in
the morning and the going forth beyond, the man disappearing ahead
into the distance of futurity, that which his purpose stands for, the
future. The sex goal needs, absolutely needs, this further departure.
And if there _be_ no further departure, no great way of belief on
ahead: and if sex is the starting point and the goal as well: then sex
becomes like the bottomless pit, insatiable. It demands at last the
departure into death, the only available beyond. Like Carmen, or like
Anna Karenina. When sex is the starting point and the returning point
both, then the only issue is death. Which is plain as a pike-staff in
"Carmen" or "Anna Karenina," and is the theme of almost _all_ modern
tragedy. Our one hackneyed, hackneyed theme. Ecstasies and agonies of
love, and final passion of death. Death is the only pure, beautiful
conclusion of a great passion. Lovers, pure lovers should say "Let it
be so."

And one is always tempted to say "Let it be so." But no, let it be not
so. Only I say this, let it be a great passion and then death, rather
than a false or faked purpose. Tolstoi said "No" to the passion and
the death conclusion. And then drew into the dreary issue of a false
conclusion. His books we