WHEN I began to live this dedicated life I was about twenty-five. After I had been living it for two or three years I began to feel as if I were a person who was living in the thick of intimate human experience. Thanks to the mysterious power being lent to me which made my imaginary experiences so vivid and satisfying, I thought I actually knew as much and perhaps even more than other people did who merely had full and eventful lives of their own. They only had one life apiece while I was living the lives of dozens. Because I believed it myself I began to give the impression to certain of my friends (who must have been a little lacking in real discernment) that I was very knowing and wise concerning the human heart, and they began to confide in me about their love affairs and ask me for advice.
It was almost as if my so-called nervous breakdown had been the equivalent of a tragic love affair which had made me superior and immune to any more of that kind of suffering. Actually it had not been the equivalent but it had had a similar effect. It had been an experience which might however be described as Thornton Wilder described love in words which I do not think can be improved upon, “as a cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth, and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.” In the same way, my illness, or its cure, or both, seemed to have inoculated me against the desire for romantic love and made me able to view it in others compassionately and without envy. I had almost gone mad from loneliness, I had almost died of it, without anybody knowing and without myself knowing until long afterward what was the matter with me. I didn’t understand what had happened. I only knew that I had not gone mad, I had not died of it. A block of paper and a pencil had saved me. They had not only saved me by satisfying my hunger and canceling the overwhelming terror of the universe, but they gave me also an inexhaustible form of entertainment because they gave me, or seemed to give me, the equivalent of all sorts of human experience. There was no end and no limit to this kind of living. Among all the people whom I knew I felt that I was the enviable one. I had substituted the invulnerable passion of art for vulnerable human passion. My circumstances were such that I was free to give myself wholly to the thing I had chosen, and I knew enough to know that such freedom is a very rare luxury.
I grieved to see my gifted friends, one after another, voluntarily letting their beautiful gifts go to waste because each of them sooner or later fell into the sickness of romantic love. I lost faith in women artists because I could see that for every one of them writing or painting was not a genuine passion, but only a temporary substitute or pastime which she was eager to lay aside instantly for the sake of a love affair or a marriage. I grieved equally when I saw nontalented human beings fail to live fully as human beings. I could not bear to see any halfhearted devotion in either direction, either to art or to living. At that unenlightened period in history the world was still full of a generation of devouring mothers who prevented their daughters’ escape by all kinds of refined and sadistic obstructions, from weak hearts and lonely widowhood to the simple, forceful ascendancy of the parent over the child. The great war between mothers and daughters was then only just beginning, and I was one of its most passionate fighters on the side of the captives. My friends probably thought of me as being much wiser than I really was partly because I was a separate person, looking on and meditating and partly because, as a partisan of the wistful daughters, I was always reiterating my belief that every human being must fulfill his or her own destiny. It must have been for these two reasons that my friends who were hesitating on the brink of perilous love affairs always confided in me and asked for my advice. They knew that I would be sure to give them the advice they wanted—that which was contrary to the world’s and to their New England consciences. They knew I would urge them to go ahead and risk everything.
I did urge them. For my conception of love was that it was merely another form of man’s assertion, which he makes in every work of art, that life is not ordinary. I was a fanatic in my belief that life is not ordinary, and in my hatred for all the acts, manners, talk, and jokes which treat the mystery of life as if it were comic and obscene, to be handled with contempt and laughed at or kicked around like an old rag. I believed that the experience of being born, of living, and of dying was all a poem, and that it should be received—all of it, every part of it—with wonder and gratitude. I thought that love was a power, like the artist’s, which suddenly gave to a man and a woman together the sense of wonder. When I saw a man and a woman in love regarding each other with an intense awareness of each other’s mystery and preciousness I believed that those two had for the time being cast off the corruption of ordinariness which makes most people blind to the miracle of existence. I believed that their sudden vision was like a saint’s or an artist’s vision. And I knew that when two unextraordinary people are in this state their happiness is in great danger. It is new to them and they do not know how to hide it and protect it from its enemies, and therefore it is in grave peril at the hands of those traditional enemies of the ones who see visions, those members of society who make and enforce the rules which are hostile to anything they themselves cannot understand, and who take upon themselves the right to treat the most sacred experiences in the manner of the police court. Whenever I heard or read in the newspapers about some poor devil of a hard-working respectable bank clerk or businessman whose career was suddenly ruined by the astounding discovery that he was keeping a mistress, I always used to imagine that he was a man who was merely trying to find for himself some reassurance that life is not ordinary—some escape from an existence that had been made intolerably unmiraculous for him by a prosaic wife. Most lives, I thought, lacking art, lacking religion, were choked and suffocated by the continual insistence of the personal, and of all its wearying insistent paraphernalia. I thought that husbands whose lives were so choked and suffocated with too much boredom and talk and anxiety and struggle wanted only a chance to worship love in the abstract, as it could be represented for them by an unknown woman or an anonymous girl in the darkness of an unfamiliar room. For this reason I believed that even prostitution should be regarded not as something evil, but as a sacred ritual, as necessary for human beings as books and music and paintings are. I felt that my old favorite magic of transformation could show that it can be a good service just as easily as it can be a profane one.
And while I sat on my doorstep in Castine that first autumn I began to dream of a house as calm and still and beautiful as a work of art, where love might find refuge. Sex was evil, I thought, only where dignity or taste or any sense of holiness were not put into it, and when the wrong people for the wrong reasons have taken it upon themselves to satisfy one of the deepest of human needs. I began to create in my imagination a house restrained and severe in design, with no decoration except fresh flowers and perhaps some beautiful shells laid along a mantelpiece, perhaps a statue and a fountain. There would be, for servants, a staff of quiet, oldish women, brisk and clean and rosy, in white aprons, to carry meals and to wash the linen and lay it in herb-scented closets, and to keep every part of the house polished and beautiful. On the upper floors there would be rooms as quiet and remote from the world as a cave beside the sea, windows with stars in them at night and with inner shutters arranged in such a way that darkness could be summoned at any hour. There would be no sense of furtiveness and guilt in the darkness of those rooms; it would be benign and mysterious as the darkness of night out of doors; it would be like an ocean of forgetfulness fathoms deep, into which tortured unhappy modern man could plunge, leaving on the surface behind him the weary garment of his identity and all the claims of the outside world that clung to his identity like pieces of lead. He would be light and free, and he would plunge deep into the darkness. The darkness in those rooms would be like a mighty bath of absolution and of forgiveness to the world for all its injury to his nerves and mind. The young women who chose to serve in my imagined house would be as wisely trained in the art of pleasing as Oriental women are, and would understand when to be still and submissive, when to be playful, when to be tender, when to lose themselves. They would have, if possible, the attributes described by Alain-Fournier as being essential ones, “audacious initiative and superhuman tact,” and would be educated, as women, so it seemed to me who had had no such education, in the highest sense of the word.
A house such as I was dreaming of would be only another example, I thought, of the easy magic of transformation by which one thing becomes its opposite. All that was needed, I thought, was a person bold and independent enough to undertake it. That person would need to be very bold indeed, because the process of transformation was so entirely a matter of faith and magic and simplicity that nobody would believe that it could be done until after it had been done. I thought for several reasons that I might be the bold person.
Sometimes a worm will sew a stitch in a young leaf, and even though the leaf may partly unfold, and partly grow and live, it will always be a crumpled and imperfect leaf. My body, like the leaf, represented that mysterious element of imperfection in Nature, which allows the worm to maim the leaf; I represented the flaw which exists side by side with a design which appears to be flawless. Because the worm had sewed a stitch in me and made me forever crumpled, I belonged to the fantastic company of the queer, the maimed, the unfit. It was understood that I could not play a part in the ordained dance of love, in obedience to the design. I was obliged, therefore, in a certain sense, to skip in my own life all the years and all the force and strength which other women gave to love and to the bearing of children. I was obliged to skip the years of sexual activity and become, while I was still young and joyous, the equivalent of an old woman, a detached, sexless, meditative observer. But I was too sympathetic and ardent to be a passive observer. I had to act in some way. I had to participate, myself, in the ritual of love and experience. With my belief in the magic of transformation and my belief in my own power to exert it, I suddenly knew that I was the suitable bold person, the little, old, young crumpled person who could accomplish, if anyone could, this amazing project. I saw myself as the potent little figure, not old and not young, conspicuously lacking in size and in beauty, who appears and reappears in all folk tales as the good godmother, the talisman-giver, the magic-bringer, who inevitably comes to the rescue of young people who are much bigger and more beautiful than she is, yet who get themselves entangled in their life-size and more than life-size human troubles and are weak and helpless until that familiar little nonhuman figure arrives on the scene. I knew that my destiny would reach its mark if I could work this unheard-of transformation and make my house the place of refuge and solace I had been dreaming of.
I sat on my doorstep in Castine in the still autumn sunlight, and I began to be quite astonished and a little appalled by the things that I found myself thinking. But I did not let that scare me. For my third wish I wrote in my imagination across the panel under the mantelpiece in the square room behind me the last two lines of Shelley’s Epipsychidion. “Come, leave the crowd which errs and which reproves, And come and be my guest, for I am Love’s.” I wrote them only in my imagination, but in my imagination they were always there, as long as the house belonged to me—the invitation which I wanted to give to all the people in the world who needed it. I might have written beside it, “Unto the pure all things are pure; but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure”; but it seemed to me it came to the same thing.
I wanted my house, then, to be a safe refuge for three kinds of people, who are all alike in being at a particular disadvantage in the outside world because they all possess and are guided by the mystic’s innocence toward life, the fearless innocence which is not afraid of facing everything, and, facing everything, dares to believe, as Blake says, that all that is, is holy. My feeling of affinity toward that fundamental kind of innocence was the basis of each of my three wishes concerning the future of the house. It was the essential attitude which I wanted my house to prove possible and to defend.