excited about it. But you
needn't. Other men have all gone through it. So don't you go creeping
off by yourself and doing things on the sly. It won't do you any
good.--I know what you'll do, because we've all been through it. I
know the thing will keep coming on you at night. But remember that I
know. Remember. And remember that I want you to leave yourself alone.
I know what it is, I tell you. I've been through it all myself. You've
got to go through these years, before you find a woman you want to
marry, and whom you can marry. I went through them myself, and got
myself worked up a good deal more than was good for me.--Try to
contain yourself. Always try to contain yourself, and be a man. That's
the only thing. Always try and be manly, and quiet in yourself.
Remember I know what it is. I've been the same, in the same state that
you are in. And probably I've behaved more foolishly and perniciously
than ever you will. So come to me if anything _really_ bothers you.
And don't feel sly and secret. I do know just what you've got and what
you haven't. I've been as bad and perhaps worse than you. And the only
thing I want of you is to be manly. Try and be manly, and quiet in
yourself."

That is about as much as a father can say to a boy, at puberty. You
have to be _very_ careful what you do: especially if you are a parent.
To translate sex into mental ideas is vile, to make a scientific fact
of it is death.

As a matter of fact there should be some sort of initiation into true
adult consciousness. Boys should be taken away from their mothers and
sisters as much as possible at adolescence. They should be given into
some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation
into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy die again,
symbolically, and pull him forth through some narrow aperture, to be
born again, and make him suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make
a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense
of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation,
from which the lad emerges emaciated, but cut off forever from
childhood, entered into the serious, responsible pale of manhood. And
with his whole consciousness convulsed by a great change, as his
dynamic psyche actually is convulsed.--And something in the same way,
to initiate girls into womanhood.

There should be the intense dynamic reaction: the physical suffering
and the physical realization sinking