whole of your spirituality on their altar still. You can nail your
skull on their limbs. They have no skulls, no minds nor faces, they
can't make eyes of love at you. Their vast life dispenses with all
this. But they will live you down.

The normal life of one of these big trees is about a hundred years. So
the Herr Baron told me.

One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be
this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg, where I have been
alone and written this book. I can't leave these trees. They have
taken some of my soul.

* * * * *

Excuse my digression, gentle reader. At first I left it out, thinking
we might not see wood for trees. But it doesn't much matter what we
see. It's nice just to look round, anywhere.

So there are two planes of being and consciousness and two modes of
relation and of function. We will call the lower plane the sensual,
the upper the spiritual. The terms may be unwise, but we can think of
no other.

Please read that again, dear reader; you'll be a bit dazzled, coming
out of the wood.

It is obvious that from the time a child is born, or conceived, it has
a permanent relation with the outer universe, relation in the two
modes, not one mode only. There are two ways of love, two ways of
activity and independence. And there needs some sort of equilibrium
between the two modes. In the same way, in physical function there is
eating and drinking, and excrementation, on the lower plane and
respiration and heartbeat on the upper plane.

Now the equilibrium to be established is fourfold. There must be a
true equilibrium between what we eat and what we reject again by
excretion: likewise between the systole and diastole of the heart,
the inspiration and expiration of our breathing. Suffice to say the
equilibrium is never quite perfect. Most people are either too fat or
too thin, too hot or too cold, too slow or too quick. There is no such
thing as an _actual_ norm, a living norm. A norm is merely an
abstraction, not a reality.

The same on the psychical plane. We either love too much, or impose
our will too much, are too spiritual or too sensual. There is not and
cannot be any actual norm of human conduct. All depends, first, on the
unknown inward need within the very nuclear centers of the individual
himself, and secondly on his circumstance. Some men _must_ be too
spiritual, some _must_ be too sensual. Some _must_ be too sympath