Why do you want to govern your child? To give him character? But who ever told you that life is for the making of character? Even if it were, you can’t give your child character. He can get it by going through a great deal. But if you govern him successfully he won’t go through a great deal. He will just be something that is like something else. He won’t be himself.
Why do you want to govern human nature? Because you want people to be good instead of bad? But how can you tell when they’re good and when they’re bad? Suppose you all agree that Jean Crones did a very bad thing? If you knew Jean Crones you should probably all see at once that he is a very good man—if he exists at all. Clear up your thinking!
Who ever told you that an anarchist wants to change human nature? Who ever told you that an anarchist’s ideal could never be attained until human nature had improved? Human nature will never “improve.” It doesn’t matter much whether you have a good nature or a bad one. It’s your thinking that counts. Clean out your minds!
If you believe these things—no, that is not enough: if you live them—you are an anarchist. You can be one right now. You needn’t wait for a change in human nature, for the millennium, or for the permission of your family. Just be one!
You have seen that “the blind, heavy, stupid thing we call government” can not give you a happy childhood. It cannot educate you or make you an interesting person. It cannot give you work, art, love, or life—or death if you think it is better to die.
And finally when you see that you can never get all the love you imagined from life; that you are trapped, really, and must find a way out; when you see that here where there is nothing is the way out, and that the wonder of life begins here—when you see all this you will be an artist, and your love that is “left over” will find its music or its words.
Stravinsky’s Three Pieces, “Grotesques,” for String Quartets[1]
AMY LOWELL