The reason it sometimes has been called conquest is not because it necessitates an act of domination, at least not exactly; the allusion is not to Napoleon but to Cook, to Amundsen — to those brave, blatantly pointless men who charted the unknown of our earth back when it couldn't simply be said, "it is known", and in so doing excuse our personal responsibilities to know it. The female body, to the masculine mind, is a landscape far more mysterious than the tundra or the steppe, and more interesting not in its exaggerated variety but in the infinite inexplicable subtlety of its variations. This thirst to know her, to know all the hers, so flatly parallels the line of Human Progress, that with a start we must realize that it is of course not a microcosm of that grand struggle but a precursor. If man thirsts for knowledge it is only through abstraction of the carnal thirst, the urge to continue through physical acts of spirituality, through the only one thing we have always known with utter conviction to be true. To not recognize these facts of thought, the truths embodied in our collective earnest anecdata, and to nonetheless proclaim a revolution, a Philosophy, a system of thought for the relegation of human experience without the input of human experience — it is folly.
Strange, isn't it, that our homunculi so reliably take form as some sort of troll, a weak foetal presence, incurious and turned inward, fat-faced and defiant. And how revealing it is. These little men, these representatives of the corporeal, ever-underfoot and loud and insistent in that irritating yet undeniable way, crammed into the space of our minds, crippled like lotus feet, incapable, we are sure, of life in the world that lies outside the mind. And, we suppose like so many representatives in more noble times, such a pale image in the face of the serene authority on whose behalf they speak: and how sad, that the body, such a perfect and unimpeachable thing in this so thoroughly impeachable world, a thing so heavenly we needed only to collect its best specimens and graft the wings of birds to them to create a convincing representative of Divinity, a thing which can walk through the world of God proud, so proud it need not walk at all, as it has no need for the reassurance of earth beneath feet — that such a thing can be so debased, be made so crippled and weak and unadmirable, by a cage so complex and yet so simple in its purity of implication as the mind.
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