Record of a Friendship

are John the Baptist preparing the way for future messiahs. Doubting
often where salvation is coming from.
I simply cannot give you an opinion on Jesus as a genital character.
Your argument for sounds just truth, but I shall have to read the
Gospels again to see if I can see the context.
I shall have to reread your book more than once; it is too vast to
grasp in one reading. I kept looking for the answer to the question...
Why, why, why? Why the hate of genital life? The origin doesn't matter
much, but the perpetuation does. Theories of father jealousies, patri­
archal states, suppression of sons simply don't click, and if they did
one would still have to go behind them and ask why, why? Five minutes
ago Zoe was undressing to go to bed. Our history master came in; she
told him to shut his eyes till she had her nighty on. She didn't get that
from us, but from other adults (domestics) and kids, but why the devil
does she seek Barabbas? Why is anti-life so easy to be captured by a
child? You end the book on a note of hope. Things are moving, you
say, towards real freedom, towards Life. But so slowly, so prone to
back-sliding. A hundred or two parents in Britain approve of auto­
genital play; less in number of adolescent love. 40 millions spank and
repress ... and the 100 or two are liberals!
You have said that I have one foot in the past. True, stuck fast in
the structural mud of Calvinism. I expect it is this that makes me fail
to accept in full your so sharply drawn distinction between embracing
and fucking. You accept no middle way, yet when I see our adolescents
have sweet love affairs for years, tender, giving and taking, I hold that
it does not matter what words are used. (By the way, they use neither
embrace nor fuck; they "sleep together. ") A rustic here never heard the
word embrace, and if fuck is· his only means of expression, his marital
life can be orgastic. I sometimes wonder if you have too easily judged all
mankind by the standards of all the neurotics you as therapist had to
meet. No, Reich, I think you overvalue mere words.
Do you recall when I said that one day people would be bottling
holy Orgone water if you didn't look out? Your book suggests to me
that that danger may not be far off. Because you refuse to be a FUhrer
you are alone in Rangeley; because you refuse to raise their Lazaruses
and make the halt and blind sound, your multitudes will seek to touch
the hem of your garment ... modem version-sitting in the Box.
In reading your final chapters about the new leader I kept asking
myself where the anti-life Paul was to come in, the guy who is to oust