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But where are
you going to draw the line? Everything tends to lose its hallowed
meaning; it becomes degraded, bestialized. Still, the roots of the idea
are sound. In giving sensual attributes to a garden god the ancients
had in mind the recklessness, the spendthrift abundance, of all
nature--not excluding our own. They tried to explain how it came about
that the sanest man is liable, under the stress of desire, to acts of
which he vainly repents at leisure. I don't suppose they meant to
justify those acts. If they had, they would have given a less equivocal
position to Priapus in their celestial hierarchy. Priapus, you know,
was not wholly divine. I think they only wanted to make it quite clear
that we cannot drive out nature with a fork. I wish we could," he
added.
And then he sighed. The poor fellow was thinking at that moment, of
balloons.
Denis remembered this conversation. Earth-worship: the cult of those
generative forces which weld together in one mighty instinct the
highest and lowliest of terrestrial creatures.


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