"But we do love ourselves," Ushi interjected. "The evidence is everywhere. It is reflected in the way we dress, the way we style our hair. We embellish the sexual distinction in so many ways and highlight it proudly. Sex is in our heart, and we say this loud and clear. How many woman wear deep-cut dresses to show off their breasts, and men love to see them. But why do we behave like Antonovna for the rest of the time and shun sex at the more intimate level, except for narrowly regulated occasions? Have we all been raped in some way that we do this. Do we thereby copy Anton's behavior? Antonovna evidently has an excuse for the barrier that she keeps. But what about society at large? What excuse does society hide behind? Beauty is a thing of life. We should embrace every aspect of it and not shun some parts of it when the challenges become a bit more complex and demanding? Helen always said, what have the challenges got to do with anything? Do they change the principle involved? Would a space-fight engineer have said that we couldn't go to the moon, because it is too difficult to calculate the correct trajectory? I don't think anybody ever said this. The engineers simply sat down and worked out a solution on the basis of known principles. Why can't we do the same in social engineering towards the greater freedom of mankind? Shouldn't our space flight there be as routine as in the physical world?"

      Ushi laughed. "Where are you living, Peter? Are you living in a world of dreams, or in the real world? We are moving backwards as society in the world at large on every front. Mankind can't even go to the moon anymore, don't you know that? America trashed its industries that gave it the ability to go to the moon. Love has been replaced with war. That cancer has spread all across the world. America's Apollo moon exploration program has been shut down two-thirds the way into the program. It was shut down for the sake of war. Instead of expanding the knowledge of mankind for a richer future, America diverted its resources to feed its killing machines that have murdered upwards to three million people in the war that ravished Vietnam and raped the humanity of the American society when the inhumanity of that war was brought home into America's living rooms in full color. We've been moving backwards ever since on every front that is intrinsically human, sex included. Sexual appreciation comes from the heart, Peter, doesn't it? When the heart dies, it dies. It becomes empty. Sex doesn't come from an object. If the heart is blackened, everything else becomes blackened. The strands of love in the lateral lattice of our humanity are out-flowing from the heart by its principles. If that flow is diminished there is little light in the human Universe. And if the flow is diminished to zero with greed, for which wars are instigated and any other form of fascist rape, there is no light at all to be found, because then people try to make the flow to go backwards. They become black holes. Anton is caught up in that situation. She sees sex as an in-rushing disease that has made her world dark and ugly. The Universe has stopped function for her. It's no longer a human Universe."

      "I think that a spark of light still remains in her and that its light will become brighter," I interrupted Ushi. "So I think we can help her in finding value and joy in her out-flowing light. The rest is out of our hands. But we can only do this if this light is flowing richly and freely in our own life from our own heart and soul."

      "If it wasn't for that out-flowing light from the heart there would be no 'light' in the human Universe at all," said Ushi. "Doesn't that make our original question silly, Peter, when we asked what does it matter where a rose grows? Does its location change the principle involved?"

      "We were asking those silly questions then, because that's how silly society deals with each other," I replied. "We didn't know any better then. We were perplexed to note that when the property mythology becomes superimposed unto this scene, the silly inconsistencies often become tragic with consequences. The world tries to privatize love and make it flow backwards. The same happens with sex. That's silly, Peter, and its tragic because the Universe doesn't work that way. We didn't realize this then. We didn't realize then that all light in life is out-flowing from the heart. We realize this now, and let the light flow, and try our best not to block a single part of it whenever we meet. Shouldn't Antonovna find her freedom in this light too that illumines the Universe? In fact, can she really live outside of this Universe of our humanity that Helen saw functioning as a vast lateral lattice, with all hearts bound together by strands of light, the strands of our love? I don't think anybody really lives outside the sphere of our humanity that Helen beheld in that manner in a crisis when healing was urgent. We really don't live outside that lateral lattice of our humanity, though we often pretend that we do."

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Stories about  Love from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche