Quotes about Manhood

The cultivated heart, imagined then as a house with many rooms, or an alchemical vase able to sustain high temperatures to assist creation of new substances, or imagined as a walled garden with rare flowers, order, solitude, place for intimacy with another, disdain of ordinary chaotic life, represented immense effort. It still does. Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.

The growth of a man can be imagined as a power that gradually expands downward: the voice expands downward into the open vowels that carry emotion, and into the rough consonants that are like gates holding that water; the hurt feelings expand downward into compassion; the intelligence expands with awe into the great arguments or antinomies men have debated for centuries; and the mood-man expands downward into those vast rooms of melancholy under the earth, where we are more alive the older we get, more in tune with the earth and the great roots.

It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America.

“No man has ever risen to the real stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.”

Look now: the Beast that I made:
he eats grass like a bull.
Look: the power in his thighs
the pulsing sinews in his belly.
His penis stiffens like a pine;
his testicles bulge with vigor.
His ribs are bars of bronze,
his bones iron beams.
He is first of the works of God,
created to be my plaything.
He lies under the lotus,
hidden by reeds and shadows.
He is calm though the river rages,
though the torrent beats against his mouth.
Who then will take him by the eyes
or pierce his nose with a peg?
Will you catch the Serpent with a fishhook
or tie his tongue with a thread?
Will you pass a string through his nose
or crack his jaw with a pin?
Will he plead with you for mercy
and timidly beg your pardon?
Will he come to terms of surrender
and promise to be your slave?
Will you play with him like a sparrow
or put him on a leash for your girls?
Will merchants bid for his carcass
and parcel him out to shops?
Will you riddle his skin with spears,
split his head with harpoons?
Go ahead: attack him:
you will never try it again.

We are born male.  We must learn to be men.  Remember, strength is a force.  It is an attribute of the heart.  Its opposite is not weakness and fear, but confusion, lack of clarity, and lack of sound intention.  If you are able to discern the path with heart and follow it even when at the moment it seems wrong, then and only then are you strong.  Remember the words of Tao te ching.  "The only true strength is a strength that people do not fear."  Strength based in force is a strength people fear.  Strength based in love is a strength people crave.

If S.B. sometimes railed against Western customs, treating democracy as if it was a euphemism for bad faith, red tape, and diplomatic evasiveness, this was not because he put himself above the lway, ready to waive constitutional procedures, or ignore the views of others. It simply reflected his impatience with indecisiveness, and his aristocratic heritage. It was his pride in this heritage that led him, as an eleven year old boy to stand up to Mr. Vincent's disparaging conflation of Kuranko and savages. To be Kuranko was, as his father had told him, the only conceivable way of being a man. But when S. B. invoked Kuranko-ness, it was not some form of tribalism that he had in mind, but the values he held dear-- not only forthrightness, stoicism, hard work, and self-reliance, but also honesty, generosit, and fidelity to one's principles. Pertinently, it was S. B. many years ago, who provided me with a not implausible etymology for the word Kuranko. "It iwas from the kure tree," he said, "whose wood is very hard."Thus, to say kure n'ko is to imply that the speaker is tough-minded, able to withstand all kinds of hardships, and persevere, like the kure tree.