The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again. Eclipsed as they may be in the gross appreciation of the World by other people, who excel in this and that accomplishment, individuals that nourish Nice Feelings and are intimate with the Fine Shames carry their own test of intrinsic value. Whatever may be the evils resulting from a too susceptible heart, nothing can be hoped from an insensible one. Though the scripture obliges me to remain contented, it does not enjoin me to shut my eyes to my own merit, nor restrain me from seeing when I am injured by an unjust comparison. When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. Our proverbs want rewriting. They were made in Winter, and it is Summer now, or at least it feels like it is. Young people of both genders are not in a position to view a larger proportion of the facts, about marriage and extra-marital affairs manifestations, than were open to the generations preceding them, and they are acquiring the courage to act in accordance with the facts. That means many mistakes are being made, for the deepest facts of the sensual life can only be learnt by experience, and experience can only come slow. However, it is perhaps better to make the mistakes of facing life than to make the mistakes of running away from life. For those mistakes may enrich and enlighten, while these are apt to prove futile. The paths of the sensual life are beset by difficulties; but so is the whole life. If we are to live in any true sense at all we are compelled to live precariously.  

A large proportion of the men and women of to-day form extra-marital affairs—whether or not they ultimately lead to marriage—which they conceal, or seek to conceal, from the World, this has always been so; what is new is the attitude taken towards such relationships, leading to the conception of the companionate marriage, that is, an openly acknowledged and recognizable relationship less binding than ordinary marriage, through liable to become ordinary marriage should children be born. This conception has not been put forward as a method of relaxing morals, but rather of supporting them, since the open recognition of a kind of relationship which already exists secretly on a large scale cannot but be a steadying and ennobling influence. The preceding considerations represent conditions which are modifying marriages in our Western civilization. However, they are far from overthrowing marriage or threatening the life of the family. On the contrary, they help to strengthen them. It is the rigid institution that is broken; the institution that cannot change is dying. By its flexibility and its adaptation to changing conditions, the family reveals its power of growth. However, marriage, it may once more be repeated, rests fundamentally on biological instincts and the facts of constitutional organization; it is not strictly an institution. When I wanted to go upstairs, there was my spouse coming down; or when my spouse wanted to go down, there I was coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it. 

Study your spouse closely for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good mate does not exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you, –you have married a monster. The flexibility and the adaptation are limited, and if they sometime seem extreme, that is simply because we happen to be dealing with individual cases of constitutional variation, such as we can statistically estimate. Even in Soviet Russia, where the legal flexibility of intimate unions has been carried to an extent unusual in the European World, the fundamental facts of human nature remain the same as well as the ordinary human valuations of those facts. Do you know many spouses who respect and admire their mate? And yet they are their husbands get on very well. How many individuals go to the altar with hearts that would bear inspection by the men who take them there? And yet it does not end unhappily—somehow or other the nuptial establishes jogs on. There are two types of spouses: The monandric individual, who is only drawn into serious relationships with one person, and the polyandric individual, who tends to form numerous relationships with others, either successively or simultaneously. It is found that people who abstain from extra-marital affairs are nearly twice as numerous as the polyandric spouse. You have been inoculated for marriage, and have recovered. If the course of true love never runs smooth, the course of true matchmaking sometimes does so.

 The Winchester Mystery House

Cross through the iron gates and traverse the beautiful Victorian garden to discover the mysterious stories and dramatic Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

The frequency of divorce has much increased since the Great War, but it was steadily if more slowly increasing long before, though in France the incident of divorce increased up to 1921 and since then has somewhat decreased.  The post-war so-called “epidemic of marriage” was naturally followed by an “epidemic of divorce,” which is now subsiding, although we may still expect the rate to rise slowly as the impediments are removed. In Japan, it may be remarked, which comes next to the United States in frequency of divorce, there was no post-war rise. The United States holds the record; in 1923 there were 360 divorces to 100,000 of married population (or 149 to 100,000 of the whole population). And in some States, this means one or more divorces to every five marries, though, according to the later American results of Grove and Ogburn, there is one divorce to every seven marriages, actors and musicians constituting the most divorcing professional class. In Europe, Austria, and Switzerland stand high, and England very low with only 6.8 divorces to 100,000 of population.  In Russia divorce may be obtained at the wish of either party (and at the wish of both it may be arranged before the Registrar, without recourse to the Courts), yet divorce is far less frequent than in the United States, and the younger generation cultivate the ideals of self-discipline and self-control. Such differences represent differences of social opinion and of religion, as well as discrepant facilities for obtaining divorce. The general advance of divorce corresponds to the normal condition of advanced civilization and represents a necessary and healthy adjustment to the complex social conditions.  Divorce by mutual consent (and even on demand of either party) is the goal towards which we are moving, and it has already been reached in some countries.

It is reasonable that a contract formed by mutual consent should be dissolvable by mutual consent, and so far from divorce being destructive to the family, we may agree that it is a necessary means of preserving the dignity of marriage by ending such marriages as have ceased to be worthy of the name. Still, it causes great hardship on the family. Often when couple divorce, it rips their hearts to shreds and scrambles their brains, making them unable to respond to life properly or sometimes they are so damaged that they cannot even work. Divorce may also poison a parent’s relationship with their children to the point children are indifferent to one or both of the parents and in some cases, they may not like one or both of the parents. Then another person caused the parent divorce, or the parent starts dating right after a divorce, the child(ren) may strongly dislike the object of their parents’ affection and may be embarrassed to be seen in public or be associated with the person their parent is dating.   The tendency to diminish the rigidity of marriage ties is being carried further, it may be added, than an increased legal facility for divorce can carry it. Many couples marry because they plan to spend their lives together, they work, build bank accounts, homes, and retirement accounts, and when the couple divorces, these assets have to split up and often times one or both parties may not be able to sustain their lifestyle and could end up going broke and losing their homes after paying for a divorce. 

Also, their retirement accounts may get drained, and they have to start all over. There is also the issue of child support, parents still are responsible for supporting them kids and may have to pay for them until they turn eighteen and that sometimes can include the cost of a college education, which something cost $100,000.00. There is undouble a tendency in our Western civilization to recognize the existence of sexual relationships outside of marriage altogether, always provided that such relationships are not for the procreation of children. It may be aid that such extra-marital manifestations of the sexual life are no novelty. Prostitution has flourished in secret and even been defended in public, while what is called seduction has everywhere been taking place. However, the novelty often lies in the fact that both prostitution and seduction are diminishing. Prostitution is becoming less attractive and seduction less possible. The palmy days of prostitution (which seems to have begun as a religious rite) were before syphilis entered civilization, and its prestige has been gradually falling ever since.  Seduction in the legitimate sense of the word (as seduced is often merely the expression used by women of low social class to describe their first act of sexual intercourse) is only possible when the woman is unduly ignorant of the nature of sexual relations, and the state of affairs is coming to an end. However, when prostitution and seduction are, so far as possible, eliminated, the objections to the formation of sexual relationships—in the absence of higher ethical or religious considerations and provided offspring are not contemplated—largely fall away. There can be no doubt that this new condition is becoming appreciated by younger generations.  

The Winchester Mystery House

Tour guide will lead you deep inside the haunted spaces of The Winchester Mystery House to explore. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

It often happens that if the daughter is right, the mother is wrong, and the mother is not going to have this if she can help it. The desirability of controlling the appearance of the child(ren) in the family brings us to the question of contraception. That is a question around which in the immediate past much controversy raged. It cannot even be said that it has ceased to rage.  And since in some countries of the West there are still legal disabilities to be remedied in order to bring the law into harmony with customs and opinion, propaganda is artificially stimulated. There is, however, no longer the shadow of doubt that both the principle and the practice of birth control are now firmly established in all civilized lands, and gradually becoming accepted by every class of the community, so that before long the only matter of dispute will be concerning the best method by which it can be carried out.  It is estimated that at the present rate birth control will become practically Universal in our civilization within from twenty-five to fifty years, and it may be that with better conditions of sexual initiation, increased medical study of the difficult problems involved, and the cultivation of self-control, mechanical methods of control will become less necessary. There are three main lines along which this development has proceeded.  

In the first place there has been the insistence of women that they will no longer be breeding machines, destroying alike themselves and their excessive progeny.  In Russia, where the birth-rate rises and the infantile death rate is falling, the requirement of contraception is recognized, but not yet fully established. Abortion is legalized and conducted with due precaution, but on a large scale this is a poor substitute for contraception.  In the second place the economic conditions of life for all social classes in the modern World tend to render caution and foresight necessary in family life, and there are now but few parents who can afford to disregard so completely these conditions, and the responsibilities of bringing up children in the World of to-day, as to have an unlimited family.  In the third place, scientific demographers and statisticians are now, with ever increase in the Earth’s population, which up to about two centuries ago was practically stationary, cannot be much longer continued, since even another few decades may suffice to reach the limit of possible expansion. Each of these lines of debate are legitimate. When combined, they are of irresistible force.   

Some people practice celibacy as a form of birth control and to preserve their virtue and chastity. Another modern condition which has an important bearing on the family in our Western civilization is constituted by the increase of divorce and the ever-greater legal facilities for securing it.  Speaking generally (there are always exceptions) it may be said that in savage societies, as probably in the primitive World, mating, provided they are formed with members of the group with which mating is permitted, are easily formed and rather easily ended. In more advanced barbarous societies, in which property becomes a chief factor in society, masculine influence is more predominant than before over feminine influence, the marriage bond grows more rigid and especially rigid in favour of the husband.  In the later civilized social states this rigidity is relaxed, divorce becomes easier and more frequent, and the rights of the genders tend to be equalized. We may see that process in classic Rome. Beginning, it may well be, in a social state of more or less matriarchal constitution, when the Roman social order became patriarchal, marriage in some of its forms was almost indissoluble, and divorce, so far as it existed, was usually a privilege confined to the husband, except in a free marriage, where the wife did not fall under the manus of her husband.  However, in the later development the privileges of free marriage were extended to manus marriages, and Roman law became equally liberal to husbands and wives in the matter of divorce. That represents approximately the stage that we have to-day reached in Western civilization.  

 The Winchester Mystery House

For anyone who loves the number 13, a tour through The Winchester Mystery House is a journey through loss and grief, but ultimately a story of hope and self-reliance. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

By Randolph Harris

updated 3:40pm (EST), Sun May 6, 2012

In 1992, congress started the Space Guard program, a global network of telescopes used to find Earth threatening asteroids.  As of 2011, NASA has identified 10, 000 near Earth objects that could potentially hit planet Earth.  Scientists have found evidence that humans and dinosaurs co-existed. The evidence is in the form of cave paintings. Dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago, some scientists believe it was the result of an extraterrestrial attack. Some speculate that extraterrestrials killed off the dinosaurs to create a race of people in their image, which is what the Bible claims was God’s plan. Genesis 1:27, “And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.” The Bible also mentions leviathan, which are huge creatures, the size of a dinosaur called leviathan. The Bible does talk about ways to ride the Earth of leviathan, “break the heads of Leviathan in pieces before giving his flesh to the people of the wilderness;” Psalms 74 So maybe it is not so ironic that our cars run off of fossil fuel. Perhaps it was all predicted in the Bible?

Currently, NASA is able to redirect objects, which are headed to Earth, this leads researchers believe that it is possible that a highly advance extraterrestrial directed an asteroid toward the Yucatán Peninsula on Earth, which lead to the death of the dinosaurs.  These scientists also believe that the asteroid, which killed the dinosaurs, may have actually been an extraterrestrial weapon, not simply an asteroid.  In 1980, physicist Luis Alvarez discovered a thin layer of global settlement, which is nearly 65 million years old, and it contained high levels of iridium. Iridium is an element, not naturally found on Earth.  The materials came from somewhere in the solar system. Iridium is often detected from fall out from a nuclear explosion. To this day, Dinosaurs bones are painted with lead paint because the bones are very radioactive. Some also ask the question, “Why were only dinosaurs killed?” If a meteoroid killed off the dinosaurs, all animals on Earth should have been killed.” However, sharks, cock roaches, crocodiles, and lizards survived.  It is also believed that Leviathan still exists on Earth, in the deep sea or in unexplored lakes.  “And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.” -Revelation 13:1 

The Winchester Mystery House

 Does the Mysterious and the unknown interest you? If so, a tour through The Winchester Mystery House will leave your mind wondering. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

Within my reach! I could have touched! I might have chanced that way! Soft sauntered (walked) through the village, sauntered as soft away! So unsuspected violets within the fields low, too late for striving fingers that passed, an hour ago. A wounded deer leaps highest, I have heard a hunter tell; this but the ecstasy of death, and then the brake is still. The smitten rock that springs: a cheek is always redder just where the hectic stings! Mirth is the mail of anguish, in which it cautious arm, lest anybody spy the blood and you are hurt exclaim! The Heart asks pleasure first, and then, excuse from pain; and then, those little anodynes that deaden suffering; and then, to go to sleep; and then, if it should be the will of its Inquisitor, the liberty to die. A precious, mouldering pleasure it is to meet an antique book, in just the dress his century wore; a privilege, I think, his venerable hand to take, and warming in our own, a passage back, or two, to make to times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, his knowledge to unfold on what concerns our mutual mind, the literature old; what interested scholars most, what competitions ran when Winchester was a certainty and brave man; he traverses familiar, as one should come to town and tell you all your dreams were sown. His presence is enchantment, you beg him not to go; old volumes shake their vellum heads and tantalize, just so. Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye; much sense the starkest madness. It is the majority in this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; Demur,–you are straightway dangerous, and handled with a chain. Every generation has its own vices, and many others as well, for every generation includes individuals of opposite temperaments. That has probably been realized by most people, and the agitation over the modern individual and their many imperfections. We need not deny the reality of many of the imperfections revealed in the course of the discussion.

 It begins to be seen that our views of the present are falsified by own imaginative ideas of the past. In the depth of our unconscious we ingeniously construct a picture of the past, and then we are horrified, or delighted—according to our individual tastes—by its contrast with the present. In this matter the picture of the past is constructed out of rags and tags of what we call Victorianism. There was an amusing satire on this tendency of the human mind in a brilliant Revue not long ago played in London and New York, This Year of Winchester. Here we were given a glimpse of the Victorian groom of 1890, arriving in all his glory at seaside lodgings (in, it so chances, the coast resort where I write these lines), and then a glimpse of a similar couple in all their easy familiarity. One scarcely needs to be old enough and privileged enough to know how these things happened in 1890 to be able to state with assurance that a real man of that date was far more like that of 1928 than like his imaginary self. The real differences are in things not essential, in clothing and social conventions. I asked no other thing; no other was denied. I offered Being for it; the mighty merchant smiled. Brazil? He twirled a button, without a glance my way: but sir, is there nothing else that we can show to-day? The heart selects his own society, then shuts the door; on his divine majority obtrude no more. Unmoved, he notes the chariot’s pausing at his low gate; unmoved, and emperor kneeling upon his mat. I have known him from an ample nation choose one; then close the valves of his attention like stone.

  The Winchester Mystery House

Strange happenings occur while visiting a haunted house. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

It seems that many have passed the stresses of youth and its ardours (emotional wrath) and are able to take a wide and serene view of the facts of the present and the limited possibilities of the future. For in the past the young were too often left in ignorance of the things that belonged to their fate, it is possible that there may be limits to the consciousness, it is desirable for us to possess in youth of processes, going on within us, and of the direction in which we are moving. I am not likely, I think, to be accused of meaning by love merely a mild euphemism for the physical explosion of the sex, or by virtue merely the namby-pamby convention of goodness. If when I speak of love, I may sometimes seem to recall the media’s libido and its sublimations, there is also an echo of the love that God celebrated as one with the force that moves the stars; and when I speak of virtue, it is more often the sort of virtue which God proclaimed, free from all moralic acid, the sort which men sometimes mistake for vice, while they bow down to the hollow image of an outworn virtue, and smugly mistake their own feebleness for the will of God.

I am surrounded by traditions that once were living and now are dead, not only in the spiritual World but even in the industrial and commercial World, and yet are clung to with a passionate tenacity which blinds those who hold them to fate they are bringing down on themselves. I have an independent reverence of Victorian history, architecture, and art. As one grows older, indeed, one may observe with intelligent interest, and if one is sensitive also share, the perpetual slight change which taste is always undergoing, the perpetual slight novelty in which all life, and indeed all art, consists of. So it is possible to be young and to be old many times, even in the course of the same life. I eagerly search for things that please myself, things, some of them, which afterwards also pleased other people, so much so that they have since left me tired. We are all concerned with life, even though in different sense or on different aspects; and life means for us, at the beginning and at the end, no abstracted formula, no society, but this human organism, with its desires and its satisfactions, its ardours and its weariness, its endless mysteries, its strange possibilities, its curious loveliness, not yet fully explored and known.

It is my goal to adopt an old heroic virtue, firm alike in the discipline of self-control, and thereby in the strength to control the World, that we require to-day, whatever may have been required in the days when individuals gathered together to listen to the Sermon on the Mount and thereupon went forth to slay and steal and lie and make the World a hell. The love I have in mind is that which secretly inspires a virtue which refuses to yield weakly to the circumstances of a World moulded by the dead heroism of a past it has outgrown. It comes forward with its own heroisms to guide life into new forms, even if in doing it must sweep away the old moralities to set up other moralities more in accordance with the increased knowledge of our own days. I belong to a land where all who are truly alive are to-day specially called upon to live daringly, and where virtue, in the antique and genuine sense, as the impulse to demand things that are great and rare, becomes a prime duty. Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed. To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple host who took the flag to-day can tell the definition, so clearly, of victory, as he, defeated, drying, on whose forbidden ear the distant strains of triumph break, agonized and clear. Our share of night to bear, our share of morning, our blank in bliss to fill, our blank in scorning. Here a star, and there a star, some lose their way. Here a mist, and there a mist, afterwards—day!

The Winchester Mystery House

 Detectives have investigated the mystery of hidden treasure, strange noises, and disappearing guests at The Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/