There are certain premisses by which I lead my life. No other person could make me change them. Here they are:
“I could not love you dear so much loved I not honour more”.
I don’t know who said this but when I was studying Spanish and its literature at university I was impressed by the importance in the Golden Age (the seventeenth century) of the concept of honour. There were two different kinds “honor” and “honra”. The first means real honourable behaviour, living up to our fundamental principles and the second is false: the maintenance of a good reputation in society, whatever else has happened in secret. Ever since organised religions were invented by mankind, sexual relationships between men and women were not treated as a natural and necessary event to maintain our species, but as a stick to beat us with. It has caused trouble for centuries and it is about time to straighten it out.
I have the material to write a book which I shall call “Men and Women’s Lib”. All the tosh about equality is a stupid mistake. Men and women are complementary and both are equally responsible for the children they bring into the world. My first and most important premiss is:
No-one should be forced to do anything someone else wants.
The second is from Shakespeare:
“This above all to thine own self be true.
And thus it follows as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man”
There is one more that means more or less the same thing:
How should it benefit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
This comes from the bible which is full of useful quotations.
Most of the difficulties that arose out of Bob and I working together came about because of the differences in our basic beliefs.