Forster writes:. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire.
Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going.
She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
We are watching in the US political sphere the weird disconnection of prose from passion. Human passions still blunder around the Internet, too, where people have fallen in love and gone on to form complete relationships or marry. But in an outcome that Forster did not consider, the Internet also adds the more or less artificial experiences of cybersex to the sexual repertoire.
Sex over the 'net means incomplete involvement in different degrees, from exchanges among mutually responsive participants to the solitary viewing of pornography. Remote sex has its undeniable impact, and in a world dealing with the disease of AIDS, it may stand in for unsafe actual sex.
But can it stand in emotionally for genuine sexual love? Responding to this concern, participants at a recent Vatican conference on "Computers and Feelings" declared that cybersex is "the end of love. It is empty loneliness. F orster went further. Fearing that more technology meant less humanity, he utterly rejected the technical achievements of his time.
In , after hearing of the first successful airplane flight over a kilometer-long circuit, he wrote in his journal, ". Such a soul as mine will be crushed out. Thomas Mann once said, "A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth. The Internet, in fact, helps people find kindred spirits.
Forster did not foresee this development, but his story hints at it, for Vashti could either talk to a friend through the Machine or address an audience. Now many Internet users coalesce into groups that share concerns and emotional affinities.
People with unusual beliefs or lifestyles, with secrets they dare not tell family and friends, seek each other out in thousands of news groups, list servers, and chat rooms. These cater to a variety of interests, problems, and ways of life, including a range of strong political views; divorce, grief, and loneliness; and a spectrum of sexuality, from heterosexual to homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual orientations, with variations. Within these groups, the private and the hidden can be revealed and validated, anonymously if desired.
Forster himself grappled with the partial secret of his homosexuality, which colored his life and his writing. His biographer, P.
Furbank, concludes that Forster knew he was homosexual by the age of But while a gay lifestyle was then acceptable in some quarters, Forster did not feel he could openly declare his sexuality, or act on it freely.
The tension remained until he tried to release it in a way that would reaffirm him as a writer. After the success of Howards End in , he feared his creativity had dried up. Yet in , the idea for a novel about homosexual love came to him in a moment of revelation. That seemed to show a way out of his barren time, and he wrote Maurice enthusiastically and at great speed. When it was done in , however, Forster saw that it could not appear "until my death or England's," and it remained unpublished until after he died.
I t is only a speculation, but a revealing one, to imagine how Forster would have fared with access to a like-minded group on a net, where he could have expressed what he had to suppress in the real world. After all, as a student at Cambridge he had been elected to the exclusive intellectual society called the "Apostles," where, among other topics, homosexuality was discussed in a spirit of free and rational inquiry, providing a sense of liberation that Forster later came to value greatly.
On-line access would have created the opportunity to circulate Maurice to a larger but still select group that would accept its theme-a form of publication that would have brought even greater fulfillment. Yet time on-line would have been ill used for Forster the writer.
Aimless chat is the insidious seduction of the Internet; it can replace inward contemplation and real experience. In the decade after Maurice , Forster looked both inward and outward. His internal life became more unified as he came to terms with his self-doubts, and his sexuality.
His external life developed as he worked for the Red Cross in Alexandria during the war, returned to England, and left again for his second visit to India. He deepened old relationships, and formed new ones, in all three places. All this must have been necessary, in ways hardly discernible at the time, before Forster could break free of his unproductive period to complete A Passage to India in a ripening that came only through the slow refining of life-as-lived into understanding.
Forster probably would have sensed this-just as he understood technology's potential to both isolate and overwhelm the individual. Only humans, I think, do this. That feeling of being apart rather than a part is a real feeling, sure. But aloneness as such is not a real state of affairs. Like the pine, we are inextricably continuous with the past and the present and future, the air and the earth, the spirit and also the human surround. We are each ultimately unified within ourselves, too, though we may feel miserably fragmented.
At every moment we are accompanied and tightly surrounded, in a closely packed universe, like an avocado pit in its fruit. Bob Thurman once said that, before studying Buddhism, he thought as a young man that his life was his own to throw away.
And he played rough and tumble with his body and his fate. Since awakening to the dharma he has realized that his life is not his own to throw away. It is interwoven with everything, and cannot be hurt without hurting the entirety. In those moments when we know directly that we are a part of the human, the animal, the vegetable, the physical, the energetic and the spiritual worlds, it all starts to matter.
Strangely, this interconnection or continuity is not just a cold fact. It is a meaningful and feelingful fact.
It warms up. Being part and parcel of what happens somehow makes it all dear to us. He teaches workshops in Incarnational Spirituality both locally and globally.
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