And I argued:
Even if I did this, it would be nothing.
What I said was reason, they would say was sacrilege.
What I said was love, they would call obscene.
What I said was truth, they would call nonsense.
My hope would bring them but despair.
My laughter would wring their panicky tears.
My God would also be their Devil.
And some of my ideals would seem un-American.
They would call my route to understanding a blind
labyrinth.
Their scientists would find me emotional.
Their priests—cold, analytical, and heartless.
Every instinct of my society would belabor me whenever I pointed out its valid opposite. And when I said, These are but local, temporal contradictions—seen together, they can be transcended, understood, contained by a man who rises above them to look down upon them, or by a man who shoulders them, why!!! All who live by the exploitation of one side of any paradox, all the mighty engineers and all the honored men of God, would jump at me.
And they would finally corner me somewhere, breaking my own rules.
The storm was upon the city, now. The oncoming cold front had won the battle of the isobars. Lightning hissed and hit some nearby edifice, accompanied by a blast of thunder. The hammer of Thor, the flashbulbs of Zeus flooded the metropolis with pale, stroboscopic light. Buildings quivered under the cannonade. Inside them the millions cowered and crossed themselves or stood admiring at their windows, each, according to his nature, responding to the grandeur of liberation.
The first drops splashed upon my parapet. My curtain stretched like a flag. Papers blew. I shut the window and ran about in the pleasant excitement of the arriving storm, making fast my small interior. The world beyond churned in ecstasies of rain, din, and colored light that showed no more than light's existence. My lamps glowed for a moment a sinister red, and came up again.
I sat there after finishing my little errands, preoccupied with the loud allegory in the street.
The psyche has its climate.
Every burning drought serves by its precise degree to lift the waters of the earth for rains—and floods, too. Every deluge brings fertile substance to the spirit's plains and exposes the rich minerals on its crags. In the cold, the plants rest; in summer, they make ready the ice-resistant seeds. The trick is not—as men believe—to become but a willful rain-maker—endeavoring by rites, fasts, dances, or sleets of solid carbon dioxide to alter the immutable for some hour's advantage. This is failure; whatever such methods steal here must be repaid elsewhere. The great accomplishment of man is to understand the relationships of climate, appreciate them all, adapt his soul to every temporal vicissitude—in the knowledge that whoever is free from pride in this one good or prejudice against that special evil cannot be engulfed, or eroded, or burned alive, or frozen into the sparse tundra of intellect, of asceticism.
He—and he alone—conveys the mutations of consciousness who tends his green valley undismayed by knowing it is the valley of winter shadow. And could he own all the reasoning power of man—could his soul present within him all that women know but cannot say—he would be as God.