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Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars. Is not man different, utterly different, at dawn from what he is at sunset / and a woman too? And does not the changing harmony and discord of their variation make the secret music of life? And is it not so throughout life? A man is different at thirty, forty, at fifty, at sixty, at seventy: and the woman at his side is different. But is there not some strange conjunction in their differences? Is there not some peculiar harmony, through youth, the period of childbirth, the period of florescence and young children, the period of woman’s change of life, painful yet also a renewal, the period of waning passion but mellowing delight of affection, the dim, unequal period of the approach of death, when the man and woman look at one another with the dim apprehension of separation that is really not a separation: is there not, throughout it all, some unseen, unknown interplay of balance, harmony, completions like some soundless symphony which moves with a rhythm from phase to phase, so different, so very different in the various movements, and yet one symphony, made out of the soundless singing of two strange and incompatible lives, a man’s and a woman’s?
Man dies, and woman dies, and perhaps separate the souls go back to the Creator. Who knows? But we know that the oneness of the bloodstream of man and woman in marriage completes the universe, as far as humanity is concerned, completes the streaming of the sun and the flowing of the stars.