Collected Essays

Time passes and, their honeymoon over, the cats begin to tell us things about humanity which even the lid of civilization ca

It is impossible for me in the space at my disposal to enumerate all the human truths which a pair of cats can reveal or confirm. I will cite only one more of the i

(From Music at Night)

Appendix

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. The domestication of sex presents a problem whose solution must be attempted on two distinct levels of human experience, the psycho-physiological and the social. On the social level the relations of the sexes have everywhere been regulated by law, by uncodified custom, by taboo and religious ritual. Hundreds of volumes have been filled with accounts of these regulations, and it is u

I shall begin not at the faraway begi

Victoria had been on the throne for seven years when, in 1844, John Humphrey Noyes published his book, Bible Communism. (It is worth remarking that, for the American public of a hundred years ago, Communism was essentially biblical. It was preached and practiced by men and women who wanted to emulate the earliest Christians. The appeal was not to Marx’s Manifesto—still unpublished when Noyes wrote his book—but to the Acts of the Apostles.) In the fourth chapter of Bible Communism and again, at greater length, in his Male Continence, written more than twenty years later, Noyes set forth his theories of sex and described the methods employed by himself and his followers for transforming a wild, God-eclipsing passion into a civilized act of worship, a prime cause of crime and misery into a source of individual happiness, social solidarity and good behavior.