The word 'eunuchry' used by novelist Thomas Wolfe, 1935

Of Time and The River (1935), a novel by Thomas Wolfe

Excerpt:

On the last morning when his sons came, Gant was there on the high porch of the hospital, among the other old men who were sitting there. All of the old men looked very feeble, shrunk, and wasted, their skins had the clear and frail transparency that men get in hospitals, and in the bright tremendous light of morning and October, the old men looked forlorn.

* * *

Their smiles and looks were pitiful in their sense of childish trust, of growing hopefulness, of wondering disbelief, but there was something shameful in them, too. In these feeble smiles of the old men there was something pleased and impotent, as if they had been adroitly castrated in the hospital and shorn of their manhood. And for some reason, one felt suddenly a choking anger and resentment against some force in life which had betrayed these old men and made them impotent--something unspeakably ruthless, cruel, and savage in the world which had made these old and useless capons. And this anger against this unknown force suddenly took personal form in a blind resentment against doctors, nurses, internes, and the whole sinister and suave perfection of the hospital which under glozing words and cynical assurances, could painlessly and deftly mutilate a living man.

* * *

"Have you ever thought, Eugene, that the great enemy of life may not be death, but life itself?" Starwick continued. "Have you never noticed that the really evil people that one meets--the people who are filled with hatred, fear, envy, rancour against life--who wish to destroy the artist and his work--are not figures of satanic darkness, who have been born with a malignant hatred against life, but rather people who have had the seeds of life within themselves and been destroyed by them? They are the people who have been given just enough to get a vision of the promised land--however brief and broken it may be--"

"But not enough to get there? Is that what you mean?"

"Exactly," Starwick answered. "They are left there in the desert, maddened by the sight of water they can never reach, and all the juices of their life then turn to gall and bitterness--to envy and malignant hate. They are the old women in the little towns and villages with the sour eyes and the envenomed flesh who have so poisoned the air with their envenomed taint that everything young and beautiful and full of joy that lives there will sicken and go dead and vicious and malignant as the air it breathes. They are the lecherous and impotent old men of the world, those foul, palsied creatures with small rheumy eyes who hate the lover and his mistress with the hate of hell and eunuchry--who try to destroy love with their hatred and the slanderous rumour of their poisoned tongues. And, finally, they are the eunuchs of the arts--the men who have the lust, without the power, for creation, and whose life goes dead and rotten with its hatred of the living artist and the living man."

Separately, I'd like to tell you something about my book, Attis & Aleph

Attis & Aleph by Tucker Lieberman is crowdfunding on BackerKit right now. It's a true story about a guy who tried to write a book titled Eunuchry.