Gwen's theory of normal libido required the possibility of erotic reaction to just about any object, it appeared.
I wondered how close that was to the actual nature of us all. The Freudians would have shrugged it off as adolescent. A carrying-into-maturity of the unsorted, unspecialized yearnings of the infant and the child. I felt that—if a person could choose—he, or she, would be far better off with Gwen's libido than the tormented fragment that the majority cherished. Cherished as the platform for all that they called love and integrity.
She was telling the truth. But presently I wondered if she had not told it a great many times, to men like myself, and to women—some women. Told it as a psychological tapestry against which to pose herself; as an advertisement, an inducement. It wouldn't be the first time I'd heard a prostitute do that. Tell the truth readily enough—too readily. Personal history—anecdotes—subclinical material. Intellectual people would fall for it. They would be seduced by it. For they have been deprived not just of the erotic play their childhood naturally yearned for but, in most cases, of the opportunity for mere discussion of the subject, which they'd have enjoyed.
Suppose eating, not sex, were the taboo of our century? Suppose it was illegal for more than two people to eat together and suppose even they had to get a license for it and eat in secret, while children were fed alone in dark closets? Suppose our billboards and newspaper ads, movies and books and art, devoted themselves to pictures of food—but never to one glimpse of anybody eating? (That's what we'd done about sex—or tried our best to do.) Wouldn't it result in secret, general passions to try esoteric foods? And wouldn't people like to get together, law or none, and talk about the tabooed object?
I thought about Bali, where people actually were a little ashamed of eating meals in public. An animal indecency to be ritualistically concealed.
I felt the familiar stab of indignation. How long would it take my fellow men to realize what they had done to themselves, and why they had done it?
To hide the real creature. To dress up the pretense that we are not instinctual.
Would we ever see? Learn? Break down the conceited barricade we'd lifted up since beyond the Stone Age—the wall between the old brain and the new cortex? Or would we, too, decay? Enter our Toynbean time of troubles, turn military, tyrannical, lucubricious and guilty—instead of loving and free, and so in the end fall prey to the outlying barbarian horde—the rest of the world, that outnumbered us sixteen to one? Was a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a collegiate agnostic, a Unitarian, a socialist nearer to insight than an old Roman?
I juggled the breathless doubt in my mind.