In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Death of Love116 1901 A very miscellaneous set of reasons, those which Lucifer has received as to why love dies. May I add one more to the assortment? And may I preface that it seems to me all the answers I have read are open to the same criticism, viz: that of hunting with a telescope for reasons of all sorts of doubtful probability, while the simple thing to do is to look with a naked eye at immediate facts. Love dies just as every manifestation of life dies, and dies the quicker in proportion to its intensity. True, there can be no universal “standard of measurement,” by which it can be determined that love, if expended in such a degree of intensity, will last so and so long. We are all mixed in different proportions, and one may love long and ‹ercely and another but indifferently and for a brief season also. But in general the love season of life is youth, and like the other feelings of youth [it lives?] out its time and has done. The shifting environment of life presses upon the ego, and moulds it in this shape today; tomorrow in that. And as this or that element of the physical mixture comes uppermost the desires of it, the direction of its activities change. Truly, the change is not wrought out without war in the soul. Love, as well as the mere animal playfulness of youth, is not relegated to the background without protest. And as it is always hard, nay really impossible, to see one’s own true re›ection in a looking-glass since the mere intent to see stiffens the play of the features, so it is impossible for the individual soul to look impartially upon itself and realize the changes wrought within it. In general I ‹nd, however, that it is your hard headed Philistine ,117 your soul that never felt aught but the outmost ripples of a strong 295 116. See pp. 93–94, 215–16. Source: Lucifer 5.26 (Sept. 21, 1901): 290. 117. Archetypal enemies of the Chosen People in the Jewish scriptures; contemptuous term for people of no culture or intellect. sensation, your creature of the earth earthy,118 who is able to recognize the passing of love, much more tranquilly than our idealists, to whom, on account of the vortices of feeling within themselves, the death of love comes in “storm and stress”119 and bitter surrender, and who, long after the thing is dead, try to galvanize the corpse. Useless to reason with such a one; he will go on painting conditions under which it might have been otherwise; he will rake the skies of imagination for fancies to reanimate his corpse, until the energy of his soul has exhausted itself. Fortunate if then those other energies for which the ›owering time has come, and for whose sake love must die, are called into active play by outer circumstance. If not; if in their half-unfolded state they suffer blight, if nothing stirs those faculties wherein the power of growth still lies, then life dies when but half-spent, and “the dead buries the dead;”120 all the days of their death they go on shoveling ashes upon a grave, and planting dream-blooms whose roots can suck no life from that barren earth. It has usually been my lot to stir up a veritable hornet buzz among the contributors of Lucifer, (old readers will remember the controversy arising over “His Confession,” and other articles) and I presume my assertion that love must die will again provoke the expression of opposition. Believe me, it is from no desire to take a singular attitude, or to arouse the spirit of opposition for the sake of hearing what will come out of it, that I am writing this. For indeed it might be said, “If you have taken a seat among the Philistines, and have come to an end of your idealism, you might be satis‹ed to hug your ugly barren fact to your own withered breast, and not throw it among us, who will at least still maintain some hope of joy by seeking ways to prolong the echoes from the harp of love.”121 GATES OF FREEDOM 296 118. Ironic allusion to 1 Cor. 15:42–47, a description of the Resurrection, in which a “natural body” (“of the earth, earthy”) is sown and a “spiritual body” raised. As an atheist, de Cleyre...

Share