THE FALL OF LOVE

Despite all the romantic poetry, romances, and love songs which our cultural past has bequeathed to us, we live in an age when love, signifying a strong and lasting emotional attachment to someone, has virtually become a thing of contempt, an outworn sentimentality that, so we believe, only the most foolish or backward of people can be expected to take seriously. It is almost as though anyone who does manage to fall in love with another person should be secretly ashamed of the fact, just as he should be secretly ashamed of himself if he undergoes a conversion to Christianity and thereupon discovers the reality of faith. Somehow he is living against the grain of the age, which has declared emotional love to be an anachronism and supplanted it with free love - the backbone of our ostensibly promiscuous society. And yet, strange as it may seem, people do still fall in love and remain loyal to a given person over a lengthy period of time, even though the age may effectively disapprove of the fact and flaunt its promiscuity. Love, despite the derogatory connotations heaped upon it by the liberated practitioners of free love, continues to manifest itself in varying intensities, and even its critics aren't wholly immune to its influence. Free lovers can become bound, just as bound lovers can eventually become free.

But why, one may ask, has love recently become so suspect, so quaint and contemptible? Surely an experience which, if all goes well, cannot be bettered in the here and now, is its own justification? Even if it doesn't compare with that eternal, impersonal love appertaining to the higher mystical state, who, having experienced it, could possibly deny its legitimacy? Isn't it a manifestation of divinity on earth translated, as it were, into temporal terms, a physical parallel to that ultimate spiritual love which, in any case, only a comparatively small minority of people are ever fortunate enough to experience? So why should one look down on it as upon something reprehensible, something to be avoided? Why indeed?

I suspect the answer to this question could be traced to the nature of our modern industrialized society, with its priority on intellect, cold rationality, business efficiency, scientific rigour, and all those other materialistic factors peculiar to a very technology-dominated, urbanized lifestyle. Having abandoned the soul-based world in close and regular contact with nature for our technological advances in large cities, we inevitably turned against the emotional life, indeed were forced to turn against it by our environmental transformations, and thus came to regard love as a hindrance or threat to our mounting intellectual bias, a powerful spokesman, as it were, for the life of the soul which we had abandoned and could no longer take seriously. Tending increasingly in the anti-natural direction of modern life, which puts an ever-stronger intellectual clamp upon our emotions, we see love as an unpleasant reminder of that other life from which we are in the process of escaping, a life centred on and governed by the soul rather than the intellect, and are consequently inclined to denounce it. Not all of us, of course! But, still, a great number, perhaps the majority who, consciously or unconsciously, relate to the general mechanistic tendency of the age.

Yet love, whether or not we endorse it, remains a fact of life, and nothing we can do to strengthen our intellectual stranglehold on life can entirely eradicate it. Deep down we don't really want to eradicate it anyway, for our essential being knows well enough that there is nothing to compare with it in the here and now, and how wonderful an experience it can be to really love someone with "all our heart", even when we are victims of the head. But, superficially, in terms of the intellect and what we are doing to ourselves and what contemporary society is doing to us, we are ranged against it, as against a powerful adversary who may usurp the domain of our rational control. For the past two-hundred years the intellect has been steadily gaining control over us, becoming increasingly powerful and autocratic. It has not, however, succeeded in becoming the complete autocrat, nor, unfortunate exceptions notwithstanding, is it ever likely to. But its progress in that direction is by no means insignificant, and what it has achieved it shows no intentions of relinquishing. Goaded-on by our industrialized society, it is now more powerful than ever before and accordingly much less inclined to tolerate competition from the soul.

A very notable example of the modern fear of the soul is afforded by Arthur Koestler's suggestion, in Janus - A Summing Up, that science should develop a special pill which will correct what he alleges to be an imbalance between the old and new brains, thus providing the intellect with greater power over the emotions. Apparently, the ostensible lack of proper co-ordination between the two brains signifies a biological mistake that should be rectified if man is to survive, since, so the argument runs, the emotional-bound old brain is responsible for most of our irrationally destructive tendencies, not the least of which is war. In light of my own argument, however, one might question the assumption that the old brain is still as powerful - and therefore problematic - as formerly. For the very suggestion put forward by Koestler would seem to betray an allegiance to the mounting imbalance in favour of the intellect, rather than constitute a valid objection to emotional tyranny. If we need to fear or curb anything, it is surely the growing power of the intellect! For it is primarily this part of our "divided house", to cite Koestler, that is responsible for the sophisticated weapons of mass-destruction now at our disposal.

The intellect wants to be the boss, but it fully realizes that when love enters the soul it ceases to be the boss, since love is more powerful than reason and soon dethrones it from its false position. Love unequivocally reasserts the sovereignty of the soul over the brain, the essential spirituality of life, and this it is loathe to accept. For contemporary society is geared to technological advancement, and for this it requires brain rather than heart, intellect rather than soul.

Thus love, when it comes, is a subversive threat to that society, being in direct opposition to the materialistic principles for which it stands. Love pulls in the opposite direction to intellect, back towards the soul, towards religion, art, nature, and everything else we have abandoned for what Spengler calls 'the Civilization', the modern materialistic epoch par excellence. Love belongs to 'the Culture', is the essence of 'the Culture', and therefore cannot find favour with 'the Civilization', which has set itself up against all that is natural and soulful. When love enters our hearts it does so stealthily, like a thief in the night, come to rob us of our prize possession - the intellect. What to cultural people would have signified a gain, a further increase in spiritual richness, is seen by us as a loss, a return to antiquated circumstances. And yet, in objectively non-historical terms, it is still very much a gain, the best temporal experience that can ever befall us, even if our intellects, our cocksure minds, persist in opinions to the contrary. As victims of the intellect-over-soul perversion our industrialized society has inflicted upon us, we have little alternative but to view such an experience back-to-front, upside down, and inside out. Yet, for all that, the experience remains essentially what it always was - a temporal manifestation of the eternal fact of Divine Love, a nourishment imperative to the life of the soul, and therefore not something detrimental to our individual wellbeing.

But how many people genuinely experience true love these days? How many people fall deeply in love with someone? Is it not evident that a majority of people, accustomed to the soul-denying conditions and routines of city life, either experience love in moderation, which is to say, in a weakened guise, or not at all? Is it not evident that the maimed and stultified condition to which we have reduced our souls through confinement in artificial environments has generally robbed us of our ability to love, our desire to love? For true love must have the right environment in which to flower. It must be cultivated like a rare and delicate plant, nourished in the right soil. It cannot grow in an infertile soil, one deprived of proper, regular, and sufficient nourishment. But if our souls, as the soil of love, are not only insufficiently nourished but maimed and poisoned, moreover, by the artificial environments in which we are obliged to live, how can they be expected to produce a passion worthy of the name love, which will endure for years with an intensity beyond mere infatuation?

Accustomed to what is imposed upon them, our souls are unable to produce that flower of flowers which, in temporal terms, is their chief justification for being, but are reduced, instead, to the arid production of weedy sentiments, silly infatuations, and empty pleasures which quickly bore or exasperate us. No wonder, then, that love becomes increasingly suspect, and the tributes paid to it by sensitive poets, novelists, and musicians of the past appear to us as gross exaggerations of romantic sensibility! How can one know what real love is with a sick soul, a soil (to return to our horticultural analogue) in which only emotional weeds and thistles can grow? How, then, can one be expected to take love seriously? Away with all this nonsense about the nobility and purity of love! Down with all those sentimental fools who mistake their weeds for flowers! Let us make do with free love, for at least that can be indulged in without sentimentality, without the consent of the soul, and, no less importantly, without emotional attachments! Who needs strings now that everyone can be free to live and work as he pleases? Away with all emotional attachments!

Thus speaks the voice of 'the Civilization', in which the intellect parades its victory over the soul in the guise of spiritual freedom. Love, religion, art, nature: these are no longer relevant, no longer meaningful. Only their substitutes will now suffice, of which sex is the most important. Sex is love without a soul, and love without a soul is free love - in a word, 'fucking' or 'bonking'. Bodies are there to be exploited, and the more bodies one exploits, or 'fucks', the freer one becomes. So one had better set to work as quickly and ruthlessly as possible! Eventually one may become so free that one can dispense with bodies altogether and either depend on what is left of one's imagination or, failing that, utilize pornography instead. And after that, well, why do anything at all? The truly free being ceases to live. He becomes a machine.

Yes, unfortunately, the modern definition of freedom does indeed point in that existential direction. For the more we turn against the soul in our preoccupation with the intellect, the more we abuse it in our technologically-dominated urban society, the more do we come, in consequence, to resemble the machines which are not so much our salvation as our undoing as human beings! (In this respect we needn't be surprised if it transpires that never before have people had such a capacity for or ability to tolerate solitude as today. For true friendship depends on the workings of a properly-nourished soul, and the more the soul is starved and maimed, the less need we have of friends. Our predilection for solitude is largely a consequence of this mechanistic condition.) We make love like a machine, like a mechanism that has been programmed to do a certain thing but to do it without any feelings, including feelings for the other person. Mechanical sex comes to replace love sex, and the latter is looked down upon as something for which an enlightened, emancipated humanity has no need. One travels a lot faster without it. Indeed, one needs to travel a lot faster because the loss of emotional commitment has to be compensated for by a greater physical commitment, by a more frequent, violent, and varied physical commitment to offset the tedium, as far as possible, that sex without love inevitably entails. It is the example of Van Norden in Tropic of Cancer rather than Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover which the industrialized world must follow, accustomed as it is to the domination of the machine. And sex must not only be indulged in as often as possible but, under the prevailing circumstances of our inability to experience genuine love, be rendered as exciting as possible, which is where recourse to all manner of sexual stimulants, aids, aphrodisiacs, perversions, and fetishistic accoutrements comes in; though no amount or combination of them can ultimately compensate, it seems, for the loss of spiritual content which has made them necessary in the first place!

Alas, even with the most up-to-date and erotic of sexual paraphernalia, mechanical sex remains a very inferior affair to love sex, and will doubtless continue to remain such, no matter what people endeavour to do to make it less so! Deprived of the emotional raison d'être which both enhances and ennobles sex, there will simply be more and more chaos, sterility, and absurdity in the sex lives of a majority of modern people who, having lost vital contact with their souls, are reduced to the level of beasts, to the level, one might say, of automata.

No wonder, therefore, that marriage becomes an increasingly meaningless institution for so many of them. For what is marriage, after all, if not a testimony to the bond of love which has sprung-up between two people and made them desirous of living harmoniously together and of propagating their kind? There can be no doubt as to the validity of marriage when the souls of the couple concerned are alive and well, and nourished on the most intense passion known to man. For how could either of the lovers possibly tolerate being estranged from each other, or tolerate the intervention of a third party into their sex lives? "What God has joined together, let no man pull asunder" reads the matrimonial injunction. Yes, but where true love is concerned, how could any man or woman not party to that love really be expected to pull it asunder? True love is its own master, against which external physical forces are doomed to labour in vain, if labour they dare. It testifies to the sovereignty of soul over matter, a sovereignty which will remain unimpaired no matter how many other people the lovers may come into contact with or, no less significantly, how many miles should separate them. Admittedly, if and when it subsequently wanes, there is perhaps a slender chance that the hitherto inseparable recipients of its bounty may be exposed to the temptation of infidelity or even of divorce. But whilst it remains at full-strength, so to speak, there is next to no possibility of this happening. Indeed, its duration should cover the period of time sufficient for the propagation and rearing of offspring, after which there is no real need for its continuation in the same form or degree, and no real need for the establishment of other sexual relationships either. For sex, after all, centres around the propagation of offspring, a duty which should use up a man's best years and take care of his sexual needs while they are at their strongest, which is compatible with the intensity of his love and the virility of his physique. After this time has elapsed, sex becomes progressively less important, less meaningful, and less wholesome, so that the formation of other sexual relationships is rendered unnecessary, if not downright ridiculous!

Such, at any rate, is how matters stand between people who have known true love and found it sufficient unto their needs. Strictly speaking, there is no substitute for it, and the chances of one's experiencing it more than once or twice in life are, frankly, pretty slim. It isn't a phenomenon that is here today and gone tomorrow, a brief interlude in one's life that may be sloughed off at will. On the contrary, it is a very deep and lasting experience which cannot be replaced or repeated on a regular basis. One either loves deeply or not at all. For how can an experience which is intended to lead to propagation and the rearing of offspring possibly be shallow? How can one enter into the difficult and responsible task of rearing a family on any but the deepest, most solid foundations? Is not love the very justification for the production of offspring, the divinely-inspired mediator which guarantees the couple concerned that whatever they produce has been sanctioned and authenticated by its presence? How, therefore, can one hope to produce anything worthwhile without the sanction of this mediator from 'On High'?

Truly, there can be few greater misfortunes than to be born to parents who were not in love with each other! For how could the child of such parents be legitimate, legitimate in the profoundest sense of the word? Even a child born out-of-wedlock would, I contend, be relatively authentic if the couple responsible were deeply and genuinely in love. He might be technically a bastard on the strength of his progenitors' unlawful relationship, but he would still be more fortunate than a child born to a married couple who were no longer or had never really been in love, and therefore weren't strictly justified in producing offspring. Whatever the physical strength or intelligence of a person brought into this life 'illegitimately', in the absence of love, there can be little doubt that he will be a freak of nature who is likely to cause more trouble in the world than anyone sanctioned by love. He may not be a spastic or a victim of mental retardation, but he will certainly be unfortunate by comparison with those whom God or nature or true love, as you prefer, has provided with an authentic soul. Perhaps it is simply this fact that distinguishes the children of light from the children of perdition, of which the world is always composed in varying degrees? Whether one is of God's or the Devil's party in life would seem to be determined from the moment of conception, whether the egg of a future child was fertilized through love or lust, soul or flesh. Thus no amount of careful nurturing subsequent to this moment could really transform the fundamental nature of the 'illegitimate' child's soul, which would remain fundamentally what it had been fashioned as throughout the remaining years of his childhood and into adulthood. For children inherit either the graces or the sins of their parents, and the way they are brought up is likely to reflect this fact. Consequently, the victim of loveless parents is unlikely, in any case, to receive the most loving of upbringings.

But any loving upbringing, even one conducted in the humblest of circumstances, would be preferable to one in which love had not played a part, no matter how wealthy the parents may happen to be. There is no substitute for genuine love, and, as such, there is no real justification for loving couples deciding to postpone a family commitment until they can 'afford' it. Unless they are without any means of support whatsoever, they should take advantage of their feelings for each other while those feelings are at their peak, and thus produce offspring in accordance with nature's prompting. For what is the point of being in love with another person if one is not intending to start a family? One doesn't fall in love simply for the sake of love. And any procrastination of procreation is not only the thief of valuable time, it is a base concession to materialism, to the opinion that children should only be brought into the world at the dictates of the pocket rather than of the heart. Procrastinate too long - if procrastinate one can - and the strength of one's love may be reduced in intensity to a very mediocre level, may even disappear altogether, so that one might subsequently be obliged to propagate in cold blood, as it were, in a context not altogether conducive to the formation of legitimate offspring. For those who are in love but do not take full advantage of it to start a family are inevitably their own worst enemies. The consequences of their procrastination will be visited, if they subsequently decide to propagate, on their offspring and, through their offspring, on them personally.

But perhaps I have said enough about the role of love in relation to happily-married 'traditional' couples to permit me to return from the conventionally idealistic platform, upon which I have stood during the last few paragraphs, to one closer to the decadent realities of the present, with its lack of genuine love and consequent breakdown of marriage. Ideally, then, one falls in love at the best possible time in one's life in order to get married and have children. There is little need, as a rule, for divorce, because the love is so intense that it keeps the couple together, even after it has waned and their children grown up. Love fulfils a necessary function in maintaining the survival of the kind on as legitimate a basis as possible. One is not properly mated until one is in love. So far so good! We shouldn't quibble with the laws of nature, which testify to the workings of a higher mind. They were not put there as a punishment but, rather, as an aid to our spiritual wellbeing.

However, even in times more conducive to our essential wellbeing, it has to be admitted that many people weren't able to take full advantage of them. Falling in love with someone isn't guaranteed simply because one lives in close contact with nature. One has to be fortunate enough to meet someone with whom it is possible to fall in love, with whom the formation of a life-long relationship is desirable. Obviously, many people don't have that good fortune and therefore have to settle for something less, for a relatively loveless and predominantly sexual relationship such as would more likely result in the propagation of 'illegitimate' offspring and the continuation, thereby, of unhealthy souls. Judging by the God-bound nature of our past culture, however, we may suppose that such 'illegitimate' offspring were formerly rather more the exception than the rule. For it seems that love and marriage were taken more seriously in the past than at present, because the soul of Western man, being in regular contact with nature, was in a much stronger position to experience true love then than now. Consequently, such love flourished and marriage was upheld as a sacred gift, not to be treated flippantly or regarded as an unnecessary imposition. Once the bond of love was formed, it had to be honoured. There could be no question of divorce.

But, subsequently, with the development of the industrialized society he inherited from the nineteenth century, Western man's capacity for love began to wane, in consequence of which the role and importance of marriage became questionable, and the institution of the family duly threatened. Cut off from nature, his soul grew progressively weaker as his intellect mounted in strength, imposing on his value-judgements an entirely new attitude to love and marriage, an attitude which we are only too familiar with in light of our cultural decline. For marriage rests on the bond of love, and where that bond is weak or, worse still, virtually non-existent, it ceases to have any real significance. Hence it must be disposed of, though not all at once. There are stages to everything, and the disintegration of marriage is no exception. The restriction to small families, say, one or two children, is a good beginning and leads, via extramarital infidelities, to divorce of an ever more frequent order, culminating, one can only suppose, in the demise of marriage altogether and a return to pre-cultural patterns of free love, or sexual relations akin to those of our very distant, savage forebears. For a return to barbarism is the only possibility in store for a declining civilization, and we are rapidly heading in that direction. Fortunately, we haven't yet entirely disposed of marriage. One still finds people who aren't completely destitute of love or the desire to have and raise children. But it has to be admitted that, under the circumstances of our diminishing capacity for love, the number of successful marriages are steadily declining in proportion to the number of unsuccessful ones.

Indeed, it would seem that we have now arrived at a point essentially the reverse of the cultural norm. For if the propagation of 'illegitimate' children, in the rather paradoxical sense in which I am here employing that term, was the exception in those centuries when Western man could love deeply and lastingly, it has now become the rule, as more and more children are brought into this world through parents who were unable to love each other or to love each other sufficiently deeply to keep their marriage together. The relative ease and frequency with which so many modern marriages break up testifies to this tragic fact all too poignantly, and goes some way towards explaining why the world is becoming an increasingly meaningless and even hateful place in which to live. For the children of light, the children whose souls were legitimized by the presence of true love in their parents, are growing fewer and fewer as the parental incapacity to love grows ever more firmly entrenched under the domination of our technological society, which continues to develop along lines inherently inimical to the soul. Small wonder that each generation tends to be more violent, callous, and destructive than the previous one! That vandalism and juvenile delinquency continue to mount! How could it be otherwise, when love is becoming such a rare commodity, when the soul has been maimed to such a deplorable extent, that all but a minority of parents are incapable of achieving love and thus passing it on to their children? Alas, our age is so tragic that we don't even comprehend the real nature or extent of its tragedy! If we are not gulled by it, like most of the liberal intelligentsia, we're more inclined to criticize and condemn it, to point out the absurdity or fundamental evil of so many of the anti-social activities in which various people regularly indulge, such as rape, vandalism, drug abuse, mugging, theft, etc., in a spirit which would suggest that such activities could be done away with, if only the people concerned would change their ways for the better.

Alas, if only they could! If only it were possible for people to transcend the materialistic influence of the environments which have imposed such absurd or evil activities upon them, and thereupon revert to lifestyles and principles akin to those of their more fortunate ancestors! Yes, if only! But, unfortunately, it isn't possible, as anyone with any real intelligence must inevitably realize. It isn't possible to discount the detrimental influence of our industrialized and urbanized society on the health or strength of the soul, and accordingly expect people to behave in a more soulful and, hence, responsible manner, clearly able to distinguish right from wrong. It isn't possible for people who were put into this world without genuine love to behave other than in the callous way they do. We must bear the consequences of what we have brought upon ourselves, and the spiritual consequences of large-scale severance from nature can be nothing if not extremely grave.

Liars, fools, and hypocrites will doubtless have their own opinions about this. But they are hardly opinions which anyone with the slightest degree of moral integrity need be expected to take seriously. The truth of modern life may not be very flattering to our egos, but it is no less of a truth for all that! For, knowingly or unknowingly, we live in an age which worships sterility, which has turned its back on the life of the soul in the name of the love-denying, soul-destroying forces of the city, and there is little we can now do to reverse the mechanistic trend of 'the Civilization', to revert to Spengler again. Love may not be completely dead but it is sadly on the wane, not, except in rare cases, entering our souls with anything like the same intensity as it did in the heyday, as it were, of 'the Culture'.

Thus arises the modern tendency to free love, to sexual promiscuity rather than emotional fidelity. And thus arises, too, most of the sexual perversions of which our age is rife, including the widespread use of pornography. For what is pornography but another indication of the triumph of the intellect over the soul, the brain over the heart, the mind over the spirit? The intellectualization of sex, against which the soulfully-oriented D.H. Lawrence wrote so vehemently, is nothing more than a consequence of our technologically-dominated age, in which the intellect continues to grow stronger at the expense of the soul and thereby, to cite Nietzsche, "revaluate all values". Needless to say, sex should not be a thing of the mind. But under the prevailing circumstances of our mind-dominated civilization, one cannot be surprised if it should increasingly become so. And neither, curiously, can one be surprised if pornography should paradoxically indicate the triumph of the body over the soul. For the voyeuristic contemplation of photographs of nude bodies necessarily rules out soulful commitment, and simply testifies to Western man's growing allegiance to the merely physical aspect of things. Like the practitioner of free love, the porno enthusiast can indulge himself in one body after another, one photograph after another of different models, because there is no emotional commitment, and therefore no lasting fidelity to any given female. Unfortunately, so long as Western society continues to pursue its technological and industrial bent, there is unlikely to be a decrease in mind-oriented attitudes to sex. On the contrary, we can only expect a rapidly growing allegiance to this further manifestation of anti-soulfulness, which also manifests itself in sex films, wherein the never-ending routines of mechanistic copulation continue to hypnotize millions of sex-crazed eyes and to fill millions of vacuous minds with lurid images of sexual depravity. If this is yet another example of free love, then it is the freest Western man has thus far evolved for himself - free love at a voyeuristic distance!

But there is, it must be admitted, a more radical manifestation of the triumph of the intellect over the soul currently in progress in the world which, if it catches on (as there seems to be every chance of its doing), will doubtless hasten our downfall and bring about the total destruction of morality, or fidelity, in other words, to the preordained natural order of things. I am referring to the idea, commonly associated with the latest eugenic developments, of deposits of sperm - previously stored in deep-freeze 'sperm banks' - from males with allegedly high IQs being introduced into the wombs of suitable females via artificial insemination, with the express intention of producing a 'master race' of technological geniuses. If both the donor and recipient are highly intelligent, then the offspring of such a procedure should, so the argument runs, also be highly intelligent, and consequently better equipped to aid the nation or cause or whatever in its struggles against political, scientific, religious, or other external threats.

Yes, we can see the intellectual side of this argument plainly enough. For it usually transpires that parents with high IQs produce intellectually superior offspring. But what of the spiritual aspect of the thing, the aspect we generally prefer not to consider these days but which still persists, like the dark side of the moon, in existing and exerting an attractive influence, no matter how feeble or perverted, upon us? Isn't it evident that love is the determining factor in deciding the spiritual status of a child - whether it is legitimate or otherwise - and that, without love existing between the parents, there can be little hope for the spiritual authenticity of the child? Is it not therefore evident that this latest eugenic strategy for producing higher intelligences can only result in the propagation of still more 'illegitimate' children, and children, moreover, whose spiritual illegitimacy will be even more radical, if anything, than those who are currently the victims of 'conventionally' loveless parents, given the enhanced impersonality coupled to higher intelligence?

Truly, one shudders for the future of humanity, a future in which an ever-increasing number of moral cretins will be let loose upon the world to further the Devil's cause in opposition to the spiritual needs of mankind! For how can a woman who elects to accept a donor's sperm in such an impersonal manner possibly be expected to experience love for him, on the basis of the scant information conveyed to her? And how can the donor be expected to feel love for the recipient, whom he may never even have seen, let alone met? If we are given sufficient reason to feel concern over the growing difficulty which couples who live together generally have in experiencing genuine love for each other, how much greater reason do we have to feel concern over a strategy of propagation which takes this problem one stage further away from the individual and endows it with a collective impersonality one stage closer to the cold, mechanical aridity of Brave New World! Does it not seem that Huxley's nightmare vision of the future is becoming more of a reality every day, especially now that methods of artificial mating are being taken so seriously in some quarters?

Alas, there would seem to be little we can do to alter the direction in which we are heading! For we cannot now return to the centuries of soulfulness in which love and marriage flourished. Shut out from nature in our giant cities, we can only press-on in the dismal course originally set for us by the Industrial Revolution and accept the destruction of traditional values as an inevitability. But we need not pretend that sex-for-sex's sake or free love or pornography or 'sperm banks' or any of the other destructive aspects of modern life which now confront us in ever-more brazen guises mark an improvement on those traditional values which 'the Civilization' is denying us. On the contrary, if we are perfectly honest with ourselves, and courageous enough to face-up to the truth of the situation, we will know only too well that true love cannot be bettered, and that it is a real tragedy of our time that, unable to experience such love properly, so many of us should be obliged to regard it with superficial disdain.

LONDON 1979 (Revised 2012)

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