The Goddess Abides: A Novel

by Pearl S. Buck

Books, for example—she had thought of books as diversion and amusement. Now she knew they were communication between minds, her own and others, living and dead.

Let me tell you an amazing truth about the human being. You’re too young to know, but I know.

The ability to love is the secret of life. So long as one can love, really love, another human being, death waits afar off. It is only when the capacity to love ceases to exist that death follows soon. I thank you, my darling, for letting me love you. It keeps death from my door.”

“Will you not wish me well?” she had asked. She remembered the long pause before he answered. “I wish you to be happy. You will find your happiness in different ways. Just now you are sure it is in marriage. Well, perhaps so. But the time will come when it will be in something else.”

“Do not limit happiness,” he had said gravely. “One takes it where one finds it.”

One happiness has passed, but hold yourself ready for the next, whatever it is. If you do not see it on the horizon, then you must create it where you are. So long as you live you may find happiness if you search for it, or create it for yourself. Perhaps the search itself is happiness.”

“Each experience of love,” Edwin had said one night in the darkness, “is a life in itself. Each has nothing to do with what has taken place before or will take place again. Love is born, it pursues its separate way, world without end, transmuted into life energy.”

Therefore I have been considering death anew. Is it an end, or is it an entrance? But what is this self of mine which can consider death as though it were a state separate from the self? Ah, it’s the separateness that is so significant! I contemplate death as though I were continuing after its arrival, exactly as I contemplate it before its arrival. I, therefore, survive since I can contemplate myself afterward as well as before. Is that specious, my darling? Be frank—I urge the truth! Don’t let my new anxiety to live beyond the grave lead me into false paths!”

said that mathematics is the music of logical thinking and of course music is the mathematics of art?”

“There’s never truth to gossip.”

you! We’ve really been together a good deal, haven’t we? And yet it took yesterday, and seeing you with that amputee, to show me what you really are—a scientist, yes, and much more—a man brilliant but compassionate, strong but gentle. I love you—of course I love you—how can I help it? But it was only yesterday that made me know I love you. I shall always love you. I’m so grateful that I do. Once long ago—or it seems very long ago—a dear old man, a very great man he was, too, loved me. And he paid me a high honor. He told me that his love for me kept him alive—not only living but alive, so that his brain could stay clear and he could do his work. That, he taught me, was the great service of love—that it gives life to the lover as well as to the beloved. I’ve never forgotten what he taught me—about love.” She was silent for a moment. Then she repeated softly what Edwin once had said. “Love keeps me not only living but alive.”

“I’m old enough to know that your loving me is—a miracle. I don’t understand it—I can only accept it and be grateful for it. It makes my own life beautiful. It makes me want to be useful to you in any way I can. I want to pour my life into yours, so that you’ll be all you dream of being—do all you dream of doing—which you would be and do without me, of course, but perhaps my loving you, as I do, will bring you more belief in yourself than you might have had alone—I mean, without me at this moment of your life, for of course there will be many others, many people, certainly one above all—” She broke off lest she weep. Instead

she smiled at him.

birth. They were two human beings who recognized their complete congeniality, their total trust, which were the components of love.

The body was only the manifestation of the spirit, translating into terms of flesh and blood, pulse and heartbeat, the yearnings of the spirit. The need for physical love was only a materialization of the spirit's craving for communication. There was no essential difference between flesh and spirit, simply a difference in mode of expression.