then! You may have laid your line from one end to the other
of the infinite. But still there's plenty of hinterland. I'll go.
Good-by. Ach, it will be so nice to be alone: not to hear you, not to
see you, not to smell you, humanity. I wish you no ill, but wisdom.
Good-by!

To be alone with one's own soul. Not to be alone without my own soul,
mind you. But to be alone with one's own soul! This, and the joy of
it, is the real goal of love. My own soul, and myself. Not my ego, my
conceit of myself. But my very soul. To be at one in my own self. Not
to be questing any more. Not to be yearning, seeking, hoping,
desiring, aspiring. But to pause, and be alone.

And to have one's own "gentle spouse" by one's side, of course, to dig
one in the ribs occasionally. Because really, being alone in peace
means being two people together. Two people who can be silent
together, and not conscious of one another outwardly. Me in my
silence, she in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the pure
circuit between us. With occasional lapses of course: digs in the ribs
if one gets too vague or self-sufficient.

They say it is better to travel than to arrive. It's not been my
experience, at least. The journey of love has been rather a
lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey. But to come at last to a nice
place under the trees, with your "amiable spouse" who has at last
learned to hold her tongue and not to bother about rights and wrongs:
her own particularly. And then to pitch a camp, and cook your rabbit,
and eat him: and to possess your own soul in silence, and to feel all
the clamor lapse. That is the best I know.

I think it is terrible to be young. The ecstasies and agonies of love,
the agonies and ecstasies of fear and doubt and drop-by-drop
fulfillment, realization. The awful process of human relationships,
love and marital relationships especially. Because we all make a very,
very bad start to-day, with our idea of love in our head, and our sex
in our head as well. All the fight till one is bled of one's
self-consciousness and sex-in-the-head. All the bitterness of the
conflict with this devil of an amiable spouse, who has got herself so
stuck in her own head. It is terrible to be young.--But one fights
one's way through it, till one is cleaned: the self-consciousness and
sex-idea burned out of one, cauterized out bit by bit, and the self
whole again, and at last free.

The best thing I have known is the stillness of accomplished ma