Wilfrid Lay

“ Thus, by throwing this same brilliant light of life with which we have ourselves been newly filled, about us, we can see what ne’er before we saw back in the times when naught we knew of this glad melting each in other’s soul here on the sandy rock-bound ocean shore, where wave and gravel mingle, air and sea and sun and sky; one universal touch and penetration of each other’s heart. ”

“ Every pair in every marriage attain absolute bliss in every love episode? Do you mean to tell me that the rose mist of dawn lasts through the entire day?
Of course, why not? Should one expect every day to be cloudy? Must we expect our lives to be [15] unhappy? Is it wholesome to live in an atmosphere of tragedy? Not to have perfect married love is to act lower than the animals—to have abolished instinct, by which they act, and not to have attained knowledge, according to which are regulated the acts of all adepts in the art of love. ”

“ The deep emotions experienced by a little boy in seeing his mother in evening dress in the ruddy glow of a red lampshade in the drawing-room gave him a depth of response to that one vision that made him twenty years later fall suddenly in love with a girl whom he saw illuminated by the red hall light in her father’s house.
One is partly, but only partly, conscious of one’s fetishes. No man except the most self-conscious student of his own mental reactions can tell exactly why he likes or dislikes anything. ”

“ But the poorest man or woman is the one who has not begun to love, and many are such even in the married state.
And they begin to enrich themselves even more than each other, when they give each to other the uttermost that is in them.
Giving is the only thing that produces fertility of giving. It is tapping the inexhaustible, the only way in which to unite oneself to the infinite. Withholding is closing up the gate to universal strength and power.
Control is not annihilation or denial. It is direction of an endless stream of energy. ”

“ Or if, enchanted himself by the glorious view—miles and miles of rolling country, numerous lakes and the silver ribbon of the Atlantic Ocean nearly eighty miles away—he is absorbed in his own sensations of grandeur, and forgets his wife down there below him as so many men do, it is just possible that another more unselfish and less uncontrolled man will give her his hand and help her to the top, slowly and courteously as behooves a man to do in spite of her effusive protestations to him to leave her and see the sunrise himself from the mountain top. ”

“ Love as an art consists of the same production of tension and relaxation in a rhythm whose first pulsation begins even in childhood and whose last is coincident with the final heartbeat of the individual. ”

“ A kiss which is ever so little retarded, a youth laying softly his lips on those of a fair maiden, and, for the period of a breath or two not taking them away, feeling that not alone the lips touched hers nor yet only his arms embraced her, is filled with a natural response which tingles through his frame to his very fingertips and makes soft and undulating the sea crag on which they stand. ”

“ He ought to have been informed that it is his privilege and power to attain the pleasure of putting his woman into another world of sheer exuberant joy—that his own pleasure in life can be attained by no other means; and that the consent of the woman to be his wife is a consent not to take one step with him, and then have him [109] vanish, but to travel the path of life-love to its end—a path that is long and joyous, a path from which no seeing man, no man with eyes of love, can ever wish to depart. ”

“ Are other men and women thus close fused, each through the other’s eyes beholding life? If not, dear one, the only other joy, not yet by us slow tasted, is to look and see how we can make them also feel the deep-down inner satisfaction pierce the very roots of their own being too, without which we should lack companionship, and feel ourselves unique and lonely. ”

“ Her charm for her husband will consist in the fact that she is woman and wife first and foremost. That is enough for a man who is first and foremost man and husband. Uninhibited woman, unwarped by sex inhibitions, spontaneously making her direct response, her natural reaction uninterrupted, unperverted, unbroken by archaic traditions that have overweighted the egoistic social instincts and debased the erotic—such a woman has and will always have the maximum of charm for unperverted man. The eternal femininity, the universal femininity, is always at the core of every woman’s being. ”

“ The amatory intimacies are never fully consummated. They get through the preliminaries of love and the first preludes; but that which comes afterward, the most beautiful and also the most difficult part, remains unenjoyed, unmastered, unconsummated. I am not referring here to what is ordinarily termed impotence. This sentimental impotence has nothing to do with mere physical weakness, but is far more disastrous, since it forever bars those affected with it from an entry into the deepest experiences of love. It is only the strong in soul who are capable of love in its completeness. ”

“ Is there any more powerful deterrent than despair to prevent a young wife from being able to produce in herself a relaxation of erotic tensions? Her usual course, when she begins to despair thus is to deny to herself that she has any sex feeling at all. Her husband then agrees with her and calls her frigid. This crystallization of her feelings not merely retards but annihilates whatever abilities she has to express her love in an erotic way. She fortifies herself with the compensating thought that sex is, as she has always heard, sinful, filthy, nauseating. ”

“ Such men never mate a woman in the highest sense. They only supply her with a child in the guise of a husband. There is no mutuality between the surf and the bather who is helplessly tossed about in the breakers and is finally washed up on the shore and left breathless by his contact with the countless laughter of the sea. ”

“ To use a term from pathological psychology, every husband who does not secure his wife’s erotic acme before or with his own, actually hallucinates, for his own benefit, that reaction on her part. He is exactly like a man walking along a level sidewalk and making as if to step upstairs each step he takes and thinking he is climbing—in so far, just crazy, that is all.
It would be much better in some ways for a husband of this type to renounce love episodes forever, for such actions form no part of a real one; they are as productive as half a pair of scissors without the other half. ”

“ The love drama is the term that applies to the relations of one man and one woman for the time when they devote themselves to each other. It may be an hour or a lifetime, but the hour-long period surely is a pitiful experience, a one-act farce, compared with the grandeur of the lifelong relation. A man who thinks he prefers a succession of short periods with different women condemns himself unnecessarily to a course of action which resembles the career of a tea-tester. He may become a connoisseur in various flavours but he cannot learn much about women. ”

“ The man to whom the love episode is only an animal sex act, a swift and dizzy whirl, is one who, so to speak does not in advance plot out the trajectory of this flight, does not let the component factors enter his consciousness for long enough to observe them and devote some conscious love to them. These innate associations are there in his unconscious; but his training has repressed them. Such a man to whom the love episode is like a swift gulping of strong liquor has no time to reflect upon its various bouquets and glints in natural and artificial light. ”

“ In the creation and maintenance of mutuality in the early married life the young husband is the only one concerned. If there is real mutuality caused by a perfect response in his bride, he can maintain it only if he knows how he has gained it. If it was gained by merely instinctive actions on his own part, and if he is impressed by the beauty of the mystery, and repeats to himself how wonderful it is, and how inexplicable to have so warm a response, he will not have a good chance of continuing it. ”

“ Many children never see any endearments between their parents, partly because when the children are old enough consciously to notice these, they have ceased to take place. The marriage of the parents has run down. They are no longer lovers but [87] purely egoistic-social business partners in the home.
But where should a tradition arise, and how be perpetuated, of a noble type of marital love, except in and by the children’s home? How should they learn anything or where should they best learn of married happiness except from their father and mother? ”

“ So much of their attention husbands must give in order to get what few really get—the total response in every fibre of their wives’ life-love. They cannot get anything by merely taking. Things merely taken turn to dust in their hands. What they want to get must be lured forth from the unconscious depths of their wives and must, to the wife, seem uncaused, spontaneous, no matter how much the husband knows he has practised art. ”

“ No marriage except a life marriage can be complete any more than a single demi-human existence can be complete until death has rendered any further development impossible.
Just as a man can never know till the end of his life all the possibilities his life held for him, and should endeavour in every way to develop to its fullest every potentiality of expression of his personality, so no pair can ever know until the end of their joint life all the potentialities of the different ages of married life; for each age has its own. ”

“ For there are reactions of every variety. If you have ever used a blow pipe on a piece of copper, and observed the iridescence which soon comes, you will realize the same beauties in every sense preceding the complete annealing of your wife by the heat of passion you engender in her. If you have ever watched the iridescence of a spraying fountain in the sun, you will see the same effect in the emotions of your wife when the relaxation of tension has broken up her being into fine particles that float slowly down and refract the light rays of your love. ”

“ For, while a conflict between two forces, one or both of which were in the unconscious, is more satisfactorily and successfully carried on if the two forces are brought out into the open light of consciousness, the conflict still remains, and is only shifted to another field where it may go on as before, and with unabated fierceness.
The conflict between the individual and society is just as great whether a man takes it out in himself through a neurosis or gives up the neurosis and takes a prostitute or a regular mistress, neither of which has the sanction of society. ”

“ While admitting, however, the desirability, indeed even the necessity, of variety in life which means the family life as well, we should not forget that the lack of variety in marital existence is mostly if not exclusively due to the infantility of the husband. Marriage is the most vital institution of society, but the one that has been most carelessly left to its own haphazard development.
For this abandonment of marriage to its own fate amidst the most hostile possible environment of rapidly developing egoistic-social impulses, the husband is solely to blame. ”

“ All his being is pervaded by the sweet breathlessness of that virgin experience of a maiden’s lips, a touch that spreads like fire through his body and craves quenching by another kiss which but extends the influence of the first. ”