“Do you think you’re so much stronger mentally, morally and spiritually than you were? Did you cultivate that strength consciously? Could you tell others how to do it?”
“Yes, dear one, to all three questions, and so are you. The thing that finally touched off this day’s passionate union was our realization, helped by the increasing frankness forced by modern science on all vital matters, that sex life is a part of the love life, and that not only is sex not exclusively physical, but it is more mental than physical. Men as ancient as Ovid knew that love is an art, but they did not know it as well as we do today. If it is an art, it can be taught, it must be taught. The reason it has not been taught is the taboo on sex. But that is being lifted gradually and people are beginning to realize that sexless love is as impossible as birth is impossible without the fusion of male and female germ cells. The ancient love manuals were all composed by men to enable men to get greater physical pleasure out of what they called love. The modern idea is that man and woman together are each to contribute an equal and complementary part to a spiritual fusion comparable to the fusion of two human germ cells, and that as the male cell causes a reaction on the entirety of the female cell, so the female cell causes a total reaction on the entirety of the male cell. To say that either absorbs the other is quite misleading. They stand side by side and merely melt together, forming another different cell which is the combination of all the properties of the two. This idea of love implies that the two lovers be equally frank and open in every way, concealing nothing of their own feelings from each other.”
“But, dearest, some women, I’m sure, are unable to express themselves, and others instinctively avoid revealing their true feelings, fearing perhaps to reveal because they may be giving away something it might be to their advantage to keep. They think that if they let any man, even their newly married husband, know how much they love him, they will cheapen themselves in their husband’s eyes, where they desire to be valued the most.”
“Do you think you would love me less if you felt you owned me less? If you did, your love has possibly too much of ownership in it. Love is not possession, any more than it is the inability to possess.”
§ 81
The erotic acme is the detumescence following a tumescence which activates, in order to secure, a repose which can exist in consciousness only by contrast with the intense activity, vivification and vitalization of spheres of experience otherwise remaining without or beyond one’s ken.
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. More of her at once would be too keen a pleasure, would make him faintly dizzy with a joy to which he is unoriented.
The halo of that first kiss fades not in a day but lingers through his sleep, recurring poignantly like the after image of the sun caught by chance directly in his eyes.
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.
“Our lips have met, a touch compared with which our hand-clasp was a grinding of rocks in the mad surging of the ocean surf.