Record of a Friendship

because I think of the misery of millions of moulded and beaten children;
I simply do it because I think it right and fascinating. I am too little to
think of humanity by and large. Or rather to feel for humanity by and
large. I will not risk my school life so that a couple can have a love life
that is disapproved of by their parents, parents who would kill my school
if they knew.
Query: why did Jesus lose his temper with the money-changers and
the fig tree and yet mildly ask that his crucifiers be pardoned as men
who knew not what they did?
But back to the book. It is too stunning to be grasped at once, in its
way too simple. It makes me wonder if Communism will conquer the
world and in the process kill religion with its mysticism. Then a new
anti-life force without the sky mysticism will be easier to be conquered
by a desperate humanity to whom Life will not be complicated as a
mixture of earth and heaven. Meaning that I can't see universal salvation
until utter misery has forced man to look at Life and Christ as you
have seen them.
But again and again ... Why the hell? Why anti-lifism? Don't laugh
at a man of nearly 70 'S theory, for it is honest. Gluttony is not a sin,
drinking is always pardonable, slander and gossip are tolerated evils but
are not suppressed. Only love is. My new theory arising out of my
almost sexless time of life: Sex is the only instinct that decays. We eat
till we are 90 or more, we laugh, we gossip, like Sir Winston we have
our brandy. Age does not touch any pleasure except the genital one,
so that the old men, few of whom have had a full love life, feel bitter
and frustrated, and they hate the young savagely for their ability to have
genital pleasure, and hence the Oedipus suppressions. (I hasten to say
that I have no conscious jealousy of the young myself.) How to tackle
the something in us that compels us to murder Christ? In one reading
I haven't got the answer from your book, and until we know that answer
I can't see how we can love Life. True, our Peters and Zoes will have
less murder lust and their children less still, at least we hope so.
Well, Reich, I have written too much. I had to because your book
has stirred me up so much. It also troubled me. It is also the story of
your tragedy, of a prophet who in essence feels as lonely as Jesus must
have felt. You grew away from us all. Jesus was tempted to become a
FUhrer, to save mankind. You were tempted to save mankind from
atomic disaster. You both went off the rails. Poor old Jesus was not
permitted to try again, but you are luckier, for you have tried again and