I Held Out My Arms To Him

I Could Fight With The Living But I Could Not Fight The Dead. If There Was Some Woman In London That Maxim Loved, Someone He Wrote To, Visited, Dined With, Slept With, I Could Fight Her. We Would Stand On Common Ground. I Should Not Be Afraid. Anger And Jealousy Were Things That Could Be Conquered. One Day The Woman Would Grow Old Or Tired Or Different, And Maxim Would Not Love Her Anymore. But Rebecca Would Never Grow Old. Rebecca Would Always Be The Same. And She And I Could Not Fight. She Was To Strong For Me.

I Would Have Gone Too But I Wanted To Come Straight Back To You.i Kept Thinking Of You, Waiting Here, All By Yourself, Not Knowing What Was Going To Happen.

Sometimes It’s A Sort Of Indulgence To Think The Worst Of Ourselves. We Say, ‘now I Have Reached The Bottom Of The Pit, Now I Can Fall No Further,’ And It Is Almost A Pleasure To Wallow In The Darkness. The Trouble Is, It’s Not True. There Is No End To The Evil In Ourselves, Just As There Is No End To The Good. It’s A Matter Of Choice. We Struggle To Climb, Or We Struggle To Fall. The Thing Is To Discover Which Way We’re Going.

They Are Not Brave, The Days When We Are Twenty-one. They Are Full Of Little Cowardices, Little Fears Without Foundation, And One Is So Easily Bruised, So Swiftly Wounded, One Falls To The First Barbed Word. To-day, Wrapped In The Complacent Armour Of Approaching Middle Age, The Infinitesimal Pricks Of Day By Day Brush One But Lightly And Are Soon Forgotten, But Then—how A Careless Word Would Linger, Becoming A Fiery Stigma, And How A Look, A Glance Over A Shoulder, Branded Themselves As Things Eternal.

I Wondered How Many People There Were In The World Who Suffered, And Continued To Suffer, Because They Could Not Break Out From Their Own Web Of Shyness And Reserve, And In Their Blindness And Folly Built Up A Great Distorted Wall In Front Of Them That Hid The Truth.