Edward Carpenter

“ Chaplin, why are you going to Europe?"
I feel that in this last moment I should be a bit more tolerant and pleasant, no matter how difficult. I bring forth the "prop" smile again.
"For a vacation," I answer.
Then they go through the standard interview form and I try to be obliging.
Mrs. John Carpenter is on the boat—was also invited to my party, but couldn't attend—with her charming daughter, who has the face of an angel, also Mr. Edward Knoblock. We are all photographed. Doug and Mary are there. Lots of people to see me off. Somehow I don't seem interested in them very much. ”

“ Deep, deep in the human mind there is that burning blazing light of the world-consciousness—so deep indeed that the vast majority of individuals are hardly aware of its existence. Their gaze turned outwards is held and riveted by the gigantic figures and processions passing across their sky ”

“ They have seen into the heart of creation, and have perceived their union with the rest of mankind. They have had glimpses of a strange immortality belonging to them, a glimpse of their belonging to a far greater being than they have ever imagined. Just once—and a man has never forgotten it, and even if it has not recurred it has colored all the rest of his life. ”

“ The great Osiris was the Savior of the world, both in his life and death: in his life through the noble works he wrought for the benefit of mankind, and in his death through his betrayal by the powers of darkness and his resurrection from the tomb and ascent into heaven. ”

“ Stumpy domes of decayed mosques in every direction looming against the sky, mere lumps of brickwork, now turned into barns and farmyards, or with herds of goats sheltering from the sun beneath their arches—the land in some parts fairly covered with loose stones, remnants of countless buildings. ”

“ Like a strange refrain, and from centuries before our era, comes down this belief in a god who is imprisoned in each man, and whose liberation is a new birth and the beginning of a new creature: “Rejoice, ye initiates in the mystery of the liberated god”—rejoice in the thought of the hero who died as a mortal in the coffin, but rises again as Lord of all! ”

“ One day the thing for which you have toiled and spent laborious days and sleepless nights will lie broken before you—your reputation will be ruined, your ambition will be dashed, your savings of years will be lost—and for the moment you will be inclined to think that your life has been in vain. ”

“ Magnanimity; abounding Charity and Love; dignity; courage; power—all these things, are they not obviously the qualities which dawn upon the personal soul and color it when it is coming into touch with the universal? ”

“ It is the nature of youth to be long-enduring where Love is put to the test and a kind of occasional flicker—a kind of mocking semblance of hope, as like to hope as the rushing meteor is to the enduring sun—helps to support the load of misery, and so to prolong it. ”

“ Offer to it the lightest suggestion, and there springs forth from that abyss a figure corresponding, or a dozen figures, or a whole procession! The mere delight of creation calls them forth. Could anything be more wonderful? What a strange glimpse it gives us of the possibilities of Creation. ”

“ It is all as mad and unreasonable as Love is—and that is saying a good deal! In love, too, people desire to hurt each other; they do not hesitate to wound one another—wounding hearts, wounding bodies even, and hating themselves even while they act so. ”

“ Growing silently within there emerges at last something which has its home in the great spaces, which dives under and through Death, and is the companion of Titanic and Cosmic beings; something strangely surpassing all barriers and limits, and strangely finding identity by fusing and losing it in the life of others; something which at times seems almost mockingly to abandon its own identity and rise creative in new forms—sporting in the great ocean ”

“ But why accuse of deception? It is a game—the great game we are all of us playing—the whole Creation romancing away; with endless inexhaustible fertility throwing out images, ideas, new shapes and forms forever. ”

“ Afar, and folded in thine own great woe,
Alone, thy head in deep dejection bowed,
Great Christ, they crucify thee every day.
Thy face is turned aside from all that scene,
Thine eyes are weary of their age-long gaze,
Thy frame is worn, thy shrunken limbs grow lean,
Thou seem’st to tremble at the song of praise ”

“ Sometimes, in moments of inspiration, of intense enthusiasm, of revelation, such as a man feels in the midst of a battle, in moments of love and dedication to another person, and in moments of religious ecstasy, an immense world is opened up to the astonished gaze of the inner man, who sees disclosed a self stretched far beyond anything he had ever imagined. ”

“ But by the time these preparations were completed, and the evening had arrived, the fever of her anger having now passed away, Psyche fell into a state of utter wretchedness and misery. Her heart was still hardened against her supposed enemy, but it was like lead or a stone. Its weight within her was more than she could bear; and before the usual hour she retired to her couch and lay there motionless like one who could have wept her life away but the fountain of her tears was all congealed.
Long hours she lay. ”

“ Compared with this, the actual marriage, in its squalid perversity as we too often have occasion of knowing it, is as the wretched idol of the savage to the reality which it is supposed to represent; and one seems to hear the Aristophanic laughter of the gods as they contemplate man's little clay image of the Heavenly Love—which, cracked in the fire of daily life, he is fain to bind together with rusty hoops of law, and parchment bands, lest it should crumble and fall to pieces altogether. ”

“ Man will once more feel his unity with his fellows, he will feel his unity with the animals, with the mountains and the streams, with the earth itself and the slow lapse of the constellations, not as an abstract dogma of Science or Theology, but as a living and ever-present fact. ”

“ The iris-veil of our ordinary existence may truly be rent, but the visible world, the world we know, is no longer now a film on the surface of an empty bubble, but a curtain concealing a vast and teeming life, reaching down endless, in layer on layer, into the very heart of the universe. ”

“ Prince Edward Island is a favourite resort of Americans on vacation. It leaped into fame as the scene of the first successful experiments in raising foxes for their furs, and now has more than half of the fox farms in Canada. The business of selling fox skins and breeding stock is worth nearly two million dollars a year to the Prince Edward Islanders. The greatest profits are from the sales of fine breeding animals. ”

“ Willing or unwilling, overworked or dying, they have had to bear children to the caprice of their lords; and in this serf-life their very natures have been blunted; they have lost—what indeed should be the very glory and crown of woman's being—the perfect freedom and the purity of their love.
At this whole spectacle of woman's degradation the human male has looked on with stupid and open-mouthed indifference—as an ox might look on at a drowning oxherd—not even dimly divining that his own fate was somehow involved. ”

“ Over all this region, when night comes, floats a sense of unspeakable relief. The spirit—compressed during the day in painful self-defence against the burning sun above and the blinding glare below—expands in grateful joy. ”

“ Eros is a great leveler. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds115 of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. ”

“ It is a glorious day; the sun is bright, small white clouds float in the transparent blue—a day when you linger perforce on the road to enjoy the scene. But suddenly here comes a man painfully running all hot and dusty and mopping his head, and with no eye, clearly, for anything around him. ”

“ When we, each of us, descend into the world and meet the great Ocean of Life which dwells there behind all mortal forms, it is like the little phial being poured into the great reservoir. If the tiny canful which is our selves is pure and unsoiled, then when it meets the world it will blend with the Spirit which informs the world perfectly harmoniously, without distress or dislocation. ”

“ In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness,49 except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. ”

“ That we should have, all of us, this magic source somewhere buried within—this Aladdin’s lamp, this vase of the Djinns, this Pandora box of evil as well as of good, is indeed astounding; and must cause us, when we have once fully realized the fact, to envisage life quite differently from what we have ever done before. ”

“ You may walk for miles through such weary lands, extending rapidly now all over the mountain region from the base to near the tops of the highest mountains, the blackened skeletons of half-burnt trees alone remaining to tell of the old forests, of which before long there will be but a memory left. ”

“ He muffles himself in the cast-off furs of the beasts, every century swathing himself in more and more layers, more and more fearfully and wonderfully fashioned, till he ceases to be recognisable as the Man that was once the crown of the animals, and presents a more ludicrous spectacle than the monkey that sits on his own barrel organ. ”

“ There is a lovely view of cloudland from the summit now the moon has risen. All the lower lands and mountains are wrapped in mist, and you look down upon a great white rolling sea, silent, remote from the world, with only the moon and stars above, and the sound of the Buddhist priests chanting away in a low tone round the fire in their own little cabin or pansela. ”

“ Amid the woods, the scene of flitting souls—amid the crack and crash and yelling sounds—the impalpable perfume of the woods—and yet the pungent, stifling smoke—the radiance of the moon, looking from heaven at intervals so placid—the sky so heavenly—the clear-obscure up there, those buoyant upper oceans—a few large, placid stars beyond, coming silently and languidly out, and then disappearing—the melancholy, draperied night above, around. ”

“ How strange to stand a moment on the brink of terrestrial mortality, and to be conscious of—to see, even with the inner visual power—the shell one has left behind, with all its commonplace and banal surroundings: concrete indeed and material enough, but lying now outside oneself—something almost foreign to one and indifferent, abandoned on the very margin and shore of real life ”

“ We refuse to entertain the thought. Love in some mysterious way forbids the fear of death. Whether it be Siegfried who tramples the flaming, circle underfoot, or the Prince of Heaven who breaks his way through the enchanted thicket, or Orpheus who reaches his Eurydice even in the jaws of hell, or Hercules who wrestles with the lord of the underworld for Alcestis—the ancient instinct of mankind has declared in no uncertain tone that in this last encounter Love must vanquish. ”

“ For what lover would not choose rather to be seen of all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the soul of heroes, love of his own nature inspires into the lover. ”

“ Memory indeed changes from being the faint dream-shadow that we know, of things in the past, to being the things themselves, actual and ever present at our command; and with this finding of the inner soul and heart’s core of all beings it becomes possible to live over again with them the days gone by, in all detail and with ever deeper understanding of their true meaning. ”

“ And so it happened that while Psyche with ever new wonder and curiosity was examining these last, she touched the point of one of the arrows with her thumb to try its sharpness, and by chance, as her hand still trembled, punctured the skin—from which some tiny drops of roseate blood oozed forth. And so, without knowing it, by Love’s own force she fell in love with Love. Then burning more and more with desire, she gazed passionately on Eros and kissed him again and again. ”

“ Is it possible that something the same happens with whole nations and peoples—an actual lust and passion of conflict, a mad intercourse and ravishment, a kind of generation in each other, and exchange of life-essences, leaving the two peoples thereafter never more the same, but each strangely fertilized towards the future? Is it this that explains the extraordinary ecstasy which men experience on the battlefield, even amid all the horrors—an ecstasy so great that it calls them again and again to return? ”

“ A faint odor is wafted from the reviving herbage. The flat earth—which255 was a mere horizon line in the midday light—now fades into nothingness; the immense and mystic sky, hanging over on every side like a veil, opens back into myriads and myriads of stars—and it requires but little imagination to think that this planet is only an atom in the vast dome of heaven. To the Hindu, Life is that blinding sun, that fever of desire and discomfort, and night is the blessed escape, the liberation of the spirit—its grateful passage into Nirwana and the universal. ”