The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE EQUINOX life are blank. Perhaps during these years of nothingness we see things as they are ; however, civilisation touches us on the lips and we speak and forget all about them. Directly we commence to chatter, our preparation to take life seriously begins. Books are given us, and the great wide road of wonderment becomes narrowed to a straitened right-of-way down which it is a privilege and honour to pass. If we are wild, it is naughty; if wanton—immoral; in innocence we lisp the ten commandments on our mothers’ knees, only to break them when we really know what they mean. Then comes manhood and its responsibility, marriage with its one pleasure and its forty thousand plagues, as Heine says. Our birth is a matter of law or chance—equivalent symbols for the Unknown; once born, environment, circumstance, position, convention, education, all in their turn come forward to claim us and smother us in their bestial kisses. Yet like the streams and the gutters, the drains and the rivers, we all flow, roar, or trickle onwards to the same unknown sea from which we came. Sometimes Evolution flouts Ethics and we have floods, earthquakes, and the spouting of volcanoes; sometimes Ethics flouts Evolution and we are turned into artificial ponds and ornamental Serpentines; yet upon other times it hastens our course and gives us good Doulton-ware to flow through; all of us, nevertheless, whether we be tear- drop or Dead Sea, sooner or later get back to the ever-rolling ocean ; and there shall we once again be wooed by the bright beams of the Sun, that relentless God who in his fierce embrace ever and again draws us up like some earthly concubine to his heavenly couch, only once more to be divorced by the malicious 226