A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought
Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,
Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
We must have a new reformation. There must come a violent break with that irresponsible, amusement-mad, paganized pseudo-religion which passes today for the faith of Christ and which is being spread all over the world by unspiritual men employing unscriptural methods to achieve their ends.
A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point...and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point.
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at everyone who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror.
I know that in embarking on non-violence I shall be running what might be termed a mad risk. But the victories of truth have never been won without risks.
The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality - to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting - but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued - if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing - are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.