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'I know,' said Karenin at last, 'that many people are saying this
sort of thing. I know that there is a vast release of
love-making in the world. This great wave of decoration and
elaboration that has gone about the world, this Efflorescence,
has of course laid hold of that. I know that when you say that
the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world
is set free for love-making. Down there,--under the clouds, the
lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical
songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into
a luminous haze of love--sexual love.... I don't think you are
right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and you
see life--ardently--with the eyes of youth. But the power that
has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled
blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense
and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater
than any such emotions....
'All through my life--it has been a necessary part of my work--I
have had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles
that perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the
soul of our race. I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful
ecstasy of waste; "Let us sing and rejoice and be lovely and
wonderful." . . . The orgy is only beginning, Kahn.... It was
inevitable--but it is not the end of mankind....
'Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of
time that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it
forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts,
its moments, were born and wondered and played and desired and
hungered and grew weary and died. Incalculable successions of
vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest,
eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror
flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been. Life
was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished. And
then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and
hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies
not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind,
a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to
the stars.... Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of,
this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have
arisen. All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided
for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things have to be left
behind.'
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