Our institutions and social customs seem all to assume a definiteness of
preference, a singleness and a limitation of love, which is not
psychologically justifiable. People do not, I think, fall naturally into
agreement with these assumptions; they train themselves to agreement.
They take refuge from experiences that seem to carry with them the risk
at least of perplexing situations, in a theory of barred possibilities
and locked doors. How far this shy and cultivated irresponsive
lovelessness towards the world at large may not carry with it the
possibility of compensating intensities, I do not know. Quite equally
probable is a starvation of one's emotional nature.
The same reasons that make me decide against mere wanton abstinences
make me hostile to the common convention of emotional indifference to
most of the charming and interesting people one encounters. In pleasing
and being pleased, in the mutual interest, the mutual opening out of
people to one another, is the key of the door to all sweet and mellow
living.
4.4. LOVE AND DEATH.
For he who has faith, death, so far as it is his own death, ceases to
possess any quality of terror.
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