The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1928-02-20
Is Thirty
DendZime'
i'm Love-?
Continued From Page One)

eral generations, racial habit Of
sexual precocity. The city will con-
tinue to stimulate desire, and to dis
courage marriage; everything will
hinge upon that.
Promiscuity will increase, anc
women will achieve the "single
standard initiating that OF
men. Men will have many loves
and live through them; and then
at 80 or SO, they may marry. An
increasing number of them never
will marry at all.
Here at last we touch our original
question; can marriage, postponed
till 80, ever be a real love marriage
ever anything more than a marriage
de CONVEYANCE, with the banker
playing the role of the father? Can
a man love at 80?
Doubtless he can lose his head in
the heat of, desire; there is no age
that is safe from infatuation, and
Goethe at 10 could propose to girl
of 16. But could he have fallen
at her feet i'll alteration? Could he
have surrendered to her his Olym-
plan egotism and lost all thought Of
self in devotion to her?
Could his love be no more itching
of the flesh, but a hunger and thirst
to do services to the loved one, to be
near her and feel the warmth of her
presence and her comradeship?
Perhaps this full flush of love, more
spirit than body, more devotion than
desire, comes only to the young;
and middle age seldom knows It eX-
cept for one who has been loved
from early years through all the
fluctuations of desire and through
all the vicissitudes of fortune. (Our
question is not whether love dies at
30, but only whether love in its full
flower can come to a man of 80 for
a woman whom he has not loved be-
fore)
1t is a pity that when such COM
plete love comes it is not permitted,
in our cautious days, to wed the
lovers into a marriage that shall
be a VOW burned in with the UNI
stinted emotion of youth, rather
than physiological partnership en-
tered upon with the cold rational
ity of middle age, under the inSpir-
ing supervision of an alderman.
Il
TINE tragedy remains, in this
l. melting time, that we love pro-
foundly and limitlessly,, and do not
marry; that later we love again, less
profoundly and intensely, and do
not marry (the banker still frowning
upon IT'D; and that later we love
once more, very moderately and rea-
sonably, with an eye on the ledger
and marry.
How can a man feel all the de-
lightful sentilnentality of love after
ten years of adventures in erotica?
We are then, in Balzac's phrase,
gorillas trying to play on violin.
1t is is true that youth is not wise
enough to make VOWS forever that
love marriages, like other marriages,
fall upon many rocks, but who has
proved that middle age, in these
matters, is wiser than youth?
Youth never is SO foolish in adora-
ton as middle age is in desire. And
what if love must end, never hav-
ing been lowered by nature or in
tinct with an easy permanence? Is
it not better to know it in its divine
completeness, to open every door OF
the soul to it when it comes? The
pessi1nist broods over the brevity of
all good things; the optimist re-
solves to enjoy them while they last
The last word should be one of
philosophic doubt; there is always a
slight possibility that we are wrong,
and that time will smile at-or
ignore-our analysis.
Who knows but that our gener-
osity of necks and knees, our re-
placement of professional with anna
teur promiscuity, our reduction OF
women to appetizers and desserts
short term investments, and show
windows of our male prosperity, may
be but an interlude between two
ages Of control?
AS one mingles for a stifled mo-
ment in Broadway's Big Parade, and
observes the riotous emancipation OF
an instinct once SubServient to re-
production and the race, the tri-
umph Of liberalism leaps to the eye
and the mind; and one wonders II
this immoderation, too, like bitter
Puritanism, may not bring a reac-
ton that will swing us back help
lessly to an extreme of suppression
and restraint?
n =
MANY times in the past, men
I'VE have experimental with mar
riage and the family; among the
Greek love could not claim even the