Two Letters

(1) My friend:

Do you still remember that distant-near past, and those hours we spent exchanging views and thoughts, hopes and memories? This time, which folds away the lifeless and the living, glides past the immortal moments without touching them with harm, as though they stood apart from its flowing.

How often I have recalled the sentences of the thoughts we used to circle around, and tried to weigh them in the balance of society; and it appears to me that I would amend many of them — not to return to theories against which we revolted, but to see in reality what lies beyond reality, and in events what hides behind events.

How much we sang of woman's emancipation and her equality with man — but did we ever ask ourselves what emancipation and equality mean? Did not some understand by them that absolute liberty which borders on chaos and collapses into it? And since we are speaking of liberty, I cannot but think of the limits at which it must stop, or of the foundations from which it springs.

I cannot, my friend, understand man's life except as a form of realization of an immortal essence latent in his nature — the word from which his existence bursts forth. And if I measure things by these measures, I say: woman's truth and her utmost end is to be, first and last, a woman, with all the force and meaning that lie in this word.

Can there be in woman a secret deeper than the secret of her beauty, and an essence nobler than the essence of her femininity...? Can her release from this golden chain — which pours upon the world a force beside which the force of iron and fire is nothing — be anything but a crime beside which the sin of sinners is nothing?! Man's thought is bewildered when it contemplates this great universe, and it rises toward the supreme Creator who ordered it and asked into it, from His spirit, the riddle of the creating word; and when it fails to comprehend the greatest secret, the secret of creation, it confesses the limits of its faculties. The first Creator, when He placed life in man, placed in it a spark of His light; and when He fashioned woman, He kindled her eyes with a brand of His fire, that she might be the source of his inspiration, and he its instrument.

I have come to loathe democracy, so often have people chewed over its name and contradicted one another in interpreting it and realizing it. It is a veil behind which they hide the cruelest kinds of oppression and the basest patterns of life; and it seems to me that it carries us back to before civilization and history, because, under the cover of saving man, it has turned him into an obscure unit among units driven like herds to work and to battle. It has soiled what nobility remained in man's head and what purity in woman's glances. And I imagine woman, as she demands her rights, like the moth that makes for the burning light; for she will find in the written and proclaimed laws only a counterfeit garment that covers her true self and tightens the noose upon her, to efface her truth and turn her into a false existence.

We shut in the lily and screened the light from it, and behold, it wilted. As for them, they exposed it to the furnace, and behold, it melted. And all of us have sinned against truth under the name of progress, and hurried toward ruin behind the banner of salvation. Man forever circles about the straight path — now behind it, now before it, and never upon it. It is as though He who granted him of His truth covered His gift with a transparent veil, that he might see it without reaching it, and seek it without laying his hand upon it. And so he begins in sorrow and ends in anguish.

I did not wonder at your letter, though there is in it what calls for wonder. For the views you express are in truth only the elucidation of a mystical, pessimistic idea that in the past lay hidden behind rationalist progressive principles. Or say that there are two poles in your thinking, forever pulling at it, and you swing between them.

Some right may be on your side, but part of the right is not the whole of it; and in my view the part disfigures the whole instead of representing it.

It is hard for me, my friend, to plunge with you into discussions for which I have made no preparation. But be sure that however artfully you try to persuade me, you will not persuade me that socially productive work robs woman of what you call her truth — that is, the secret of her femininity and the inspiration of her beauty.

Or do you believe that woman is nothing but a picture which contemplators contemplate, until, tiring of it, they lay it away in the corners of oblivion? Or an idol which worshippers worship, until, its uses served, they smash it! Quickly wilts the fair one who squats in her house worshipping her beauty all day long, for she folds in upon her selfishness — and selfishness is death — and collapses under the weight of her pride — and pride is extinction. Is she not one of the surges of life, and life is realization and work? Then she must take the nature of those who labor in life's greater field, so that her beauty may spend itself each day in a new form. Is she not a wave of the supreme wellspring? Then she must unfold in activity and effectiveness, not sink into the folds of nothingness.

Man may lose the way and overturn the order of things, and he may err in choosing the work suited to woman's nature and set her in the place prepared for man; but error does not disgrace man, for life is trials and mistakes, and she who has gone forward on her way has straightened the crooked and mended the spoiled — and shame upon whoever stays behind the caravan.

Man cannot judge the measure of success he has achieved or will achieve while he strives to win his liberty and fulfill his mission, and every word said on this subject is exposed to disputes without end; but all theories collapse when man crosses the line of wrangling to throw himself into the great battle — the battle of life and liberation.

And if work is the first and last law, why should woman be the exception to it? And if liberty is earned — I say liberty, not chaos — why should woman not struggle in the cause of her liberation and the realization of her possibilities?