The Little Locksmith by Hathaway Katharine Butler

Author:Hathaway, Katharine Butler [Hathaway, Katharine Butler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Memoir
ISBN: 9781558617100
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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I BELIEVED passionately that every human being could be happy. I believed that everybody should pursue his own kind of happiness boldly and positively. Because I happened to have been deprived of what is generally considered necessary for a happy life, I had used all my wits to circumvent my fate, to make something out of nothing. I believed I had discovered in this process a few valuable tricks to outwit fate with, tricks by which I myself had got hold of a most extraordinary joy. My particular kind of joy happened to come through the medium of writing. Because in the midst of the bewilderments of my youth it was that particular door in my mind which I had stumbled upon and escaped through into bliss, it was the writer’s medium which I had learned to know. There were certain conditions necessary to the full experience of that kind of happiness and these I believed I understood and was qualified to establish and to offer in my house. There were also two other kinds of happiness which I believed I understood. I wanted to use my house to provide these three kinds of opportunity for fulfillment, not only for myself, but for any others who wanted them.

My first discovery of the bliss I could experience in writing had happened long before. And when I first discovered that door in my mind I found also that I could not always open it when I wanted to, especially if I wanted to very badly indeed. But after a period of struggle and despair I hit upon an abracadabra which almost never failed to open the door for me. Once safe inside, I worked like a spider, secretly and alone. The only tools I required were a pencil and a block of paper and solitude. Also, for its safety, this joy required a certain kind of understanding and protection on the part of others. This I had never really got, and I wanted a chance to demonstrate it and to give it myself to people like me who needed it.

For although the happiness came out of me like the thread out of a spider, its continued existence was dependent on protection from outside things. It was always in danger of being injured or altogether thwarted, because daily human life is not designed to recognize and guard this curious happiness. Cloisters and monasteries were invented in order to protect the life of the spirit from the life of the world, and any young person who in modern times tries to live the life of the spirit without protection is almost sure to come to grief. When in my case the life of the spirit was injured or thwarted or even threatened I suffered, it seemed, out of all reason. I felt as if a storm or an earthquake had struck my psyche. All of a sudden I felt destroyed, horribly defeated. All life seemed torn to pieces.

Usually this panic of frustration came from

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