Tides advance and recede, and there are two shores to every ocean. Truly Rebecca, I do not know which of us is more affected by the other.
Leah and Becky, Rebecca, Julie and Sherry, we meet here to negotiate our various courses in life. I am at least as much in search of my bearings now as any of you.
Yes Julie, I do trust in my fate. But I have never known what to want, and I do not know now.
That is why I cannot quite even wish for things. I have always had only my special needs, which seem more to act through me than for me. I just try to stay out of their way. They know better than I what is necessary.
Leah, you ask if the love of one's fate means to me “the acceptance of what must be and a belief in the ultimate good, or at least the lessons that fate will bring.”
A love of fate to me cannot mean a learning of lessons. I have never succeeded in learning lessons, even as a girl. Lessons seem to be beyond me.
Nor does a love of my fate mean an acceptance of what must be. I do not accept what must be. People have told me for as long as I can remember what must be, and I do not accept it.
If I had accepted what must be, Innermost House would never have been. I accept that the first Innermost House could no longer be, but I do not accept that an Innermost House cannot be. Nor do I insist that it must be again. I only insist that it was, and that without it something is missing.
But the ultimate good—in this I believe with all my heart, and I believe I always will. It is only that ultimate is far away. I do not believe that the world out there is all there can be. It was against that world that Innermost House was made. Innermost House is what cannot be in a world where things must be as they are.
I know that a great many people desire peace today. I too want peace. But I am not willing to pay the price of accepting whatever happens to be for it. I do not care if the whole world unites to compel it upon me.
I have lived for timeless years a unity of night and day, of cold and warmth, of growth and decay and death and life. If I am compelled to live in a world of endless electronic day, of perpetual summer and youth, then I will live in it.
But I do not accept it as all of what must be.
Innermost House is against the law in most places. It is unsupportably expensive. Those who want it cannot afford it, and those who can afford it don't want it. The life it requires is too plain. The thinking it demands is too high. It is unreal, impossible, misguided.
But the wonder is that within its walls I accept the whole of the way things are. I can accept the whole of the modern world, and the ancient world, and all the worlds between them. I can accept the worlds of gain and loss, and life and death, from within the walls of Innermost House.
It is Fate I truly love, Beautiful Necessity. My private destiny has meaning to me only in relation to that. If it proves my destiny to live in a new Innermost House, then I will live in it and speak from it. If my destiny lies elsewhere, then I will speak of it and declare that something is missing.