I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours
in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in _Wilhelm Meister_,
accident is destiny; and I think it was Heraclitus who said: the Daemon is
our destiny. When I think of life as a struggle with the Daemon who would
ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand
why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man
loves nothing but his destiny. In an Anglo-Saxon poem a certain man is
called, as though to call him something that summed up all heroism, "Doom
eager." I am persuaded that the Daemon delivers and deceives us, and that
he wove that netting from the stars and threw the net from his shoulder.
Then my imagination runs from Daemon to sweetheart, and I divine an
analogy that evades the intellect. I remember that Greek antiquity has bid
us look for the principal stars, that govern enemy and sweetheart alike,
among those that are about to set, in the Seventh House as the astrologers
say; and that it may be "sexual love," which is "founded upon spiritual
hate," is an image of the warfare of man and Daemon; and I even wonder if
there may not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark
between Daemon and sweetheart. I remember how often women, when in love,
grow superstitious, and believe that they can bring their lovers good
luck; and I remember an old Irish story of three young men who went
seeking for help in battle into the house of the gods at Slieve-na-mon.
"You must first be married," some god told them, "because a man's good or
evil luck comes to him through a woman."
I sometimes fence for half-an-hour at the day's end, and when I close my
eyes upon the pillow I see a foil playing before me, the button to my
face. We meet always in the deep of the mind, whatever our work, wherever
our reverie carries us, that other Will.