Sing, Aphrodite

About a year ago, Aphrodite came before the readers of "The Woman's Voice" with the confidings of her tender heart... and since then a select company of readers, men and women, have kept company with Aphrodite, followed her talks, and thrilled and trembled to them... Below is a word sent to Aphrodite by Miss Nur Salman, one of her admirers...

Sing alone upon your road... sing, Aphrodite.. for our souls have hungered for the songs of the depths...

... On the roads of this world of ours there is clucking and croaking... strangling the melodies of nature, on whose strains our forefathers grew drunk in the days of plenty and blessing...

Sing, Aphrodite.. for in your singing is the innocence of childhood and the simplicity of beauty.. and in searing pain there is a delicious sweetness...

They taught us to worship reason and intellect, as though by reason and intellect alone man lives... They taught us — and how ill they taught us — that we are merely talking animals; and so, without knowing it, they bred hatred from us and within us...

.. Have they forgotten that the human creature will not be human until he tastes the bitter aloes of pain and savors it? Have they forgotten that the cradle of genius and the roots of brilliance lie in the fertile soil of pain? And that giving... all giving spoils and perishes if it is not bestowed by a hand humbled under the tyrannous whips of pain?..

... Generations ago, when man turned back upon his own soul, analyzing its essence and asking, in the bewilderment of the helpless, after its truth, Descartes uttered his immortal sentence, "I think, therefore I am"... The rapture of discovery intoxicated him... and he stretched himself out on the bed of immortality and fame, serene and assured, believing he had settled the last riddle in our chain of riddles... and restored to our restless souls all their confidence and their peace.. God's mercies be upon him.. Let a second Descartes come back to us today, to prove to us by his logic — mathematical though it be — that we, in this existence of ours which he established, are still human beings who feel and suffer and share our brothers' feelings and their pains...

On the roads of life, Aphrodite.. there are living dead.. loitering like drunkards, the veins of their hearts hardened and their consciences dead... Will not the strains of your lyre steal into their sickly souls?

Sing, Aphrodite.. for in the darkness of the houses gaunt candles are burning down.. and in the huts and the shelters are orphaned hearts and weeping eyes denied the grace of song...

Sing, Aphrodite, for those poor souls... the dwellers of those pale, haughty palaces... perhaps you may lighten for them the weight of counterfeit happiness...

Sing.. for in the shadows of the forests, at the turnings of the wilds, you have many sisters... whom the mindless savagery of fate has robbed of their Adonis... and in your singing there is a faithful consolation...

Sing for us, for our own sake.. the melodies of innocence and simplicity... and bring us the memories of childhood and its colored pictures... and stir in us the longing, Aphrodite, for that bliss in our lives... a bliss that has passed and will never return!...