Almost, I expected as we walked away, to see the Minister
fling off his mask and motley, to see the mourners caper in relief as
at a curtain’s drop: see all of us and the dead bodies of my parents,
too, and their so polished coffins, take on the ease of supers when the
show is done: pocket their pay and pass....

From the east, a cloud, swollen and purple, voyages upon the sun. The
earth shudders as the sun is shut out, and like a festooned ship upon a
mournful sea it founders. Moving toward home, I move in a dark element,
and it has swallowed all the laughing world. This lawn is a breast
of decomposing flesh. The stones of the city are death substantiate,
feeding upon the drab-clothed men and women who weave within and
without in wistful struggle to escape. Upon my window-sill where Spring
sat and pelted me with flowers, an empty breath breathes emptiness.... The true stuff of space in which our cosmos flickers like a fly in a
night of storm? *       *       *       *       *

I am on my couch. --Oh, there must be a truth to salvage me from chaos. Life is a
whirlwind? Let the Lord which is Truth speak to me then from His
whirlwind. _c_

Three weeks I lie on my couch and am alone. Three weeks of travail and
unceasing night. And at the three weeks’ end, an infant birth of truth
so frail and so nostalgic of its womb that it scarce wills to breathe,
and every hour I must nurse it forward lest it lapse back into the
sweet Abyss. The travail has its own life. When it is done, there is the babe of a
truth. And yet how are they joined, this deep volumnear anguish and
this green sprout rising after? My travail is an earth: and from its
dark and secret brood springs a light shoot of knowing.... I am in labor of my vision. I lie locked in a distress spherical,
moveless. My room moves through time, time filters into it, so I can
mark the days. But time does not live in this passionate whirling
Sphere that is the immobile body of my meditation. Or if time, not
thrice seven days but all the years of my life and all the ages of my
roots ere I lived. All the pain of my years and their joys were this
great coil about me: were the bedded soil of my distress. And all my
loves and dreams lived in it like the solved minerals in earth. But
this spheric stuff about me is not my love nor my hate, not memory nor
dream, not pain nor joy: is all of these and mysteriously more....

       *       *       *       *       *

I am a child in my mother’s arms, and I am grown and from my lips
harsh words berate this passionate woman who is my mother and who has
withdrawn from life, finding it in her pride too painful to be borne. I am a boy striding with awkward steps beside the magnificence of my
father, and at school facing alone a crisis where he has failed to
follow ... too selfish, too dry to share in my emotion. Thoughts in
serried troops invest my mind, and I live and sleep in a clamor of
science, philosophy and dream. Fragments of verse tinkle in the stream
of studious hours: bones of dissected bodies and sprays of Spring float
together down my youthful way. I am a lover, bringing to the bed of
my beloved nosegays of books and notes. Words rise like birds from
the margin of my mind, and blacken the sky and scream and sink again,
suddenly become the stones of an exploded city crashing to the ground. Here is a bower redolent of dusk: my hands clasp the waist of a girl
and touch her breast. And in the limpid shadow of the trees, there is
a grave and I must enter it, and study bones: and count the countless
cells that a girl’s breast has moved to ecstasy within me. I sit with
a story book in the old house and watch my father rustle the evening
paper while my mother plays languorous music at the piano. My own hand
rises menacing from my little body: grows: grows immense: crushes
father and mother: shatters the walls of our house. I walk upon a field
that glitters underneath a scarlet sky. Sudden my beloved parents and
the field and all the things of earth, and all the things that live,
lift into sound! The Universe was music! Pulsant, polyphonous and vast, it slept like
the western plain, it rose like the mountains, it tided like the sea,
it sang like the stars. My heart was music. Life swelled in myriad
atoms, and every one a separate song, and all one voice, rounding,
embodying me.... But once more there is time and I am moving within it. Once more there
is this shut, expanding phase which men call life, and I am bounded by
it. *       *       *       *       *

Some fatal signal of my will has challenged Truth to let me glimpse it,
to let me _use_ it: and we are joined forever. If I am to live, I must
destroy this sin of using Truth for my own life: I must make my life
into a facet of the Truth. Men have done that. (But far more men have
died.) Oh, let me make my human life this glory! In its shallow close,
the air will gleam with a transcendent fire: all these broken surfaces
of being which men call bodies, things, will throb with the divinity
of wholeness. The common deed of spheres beyond man’s flat domain is
Miracle. And it must enter now into my life. Or else I must pass out. *       *       *       *       *

I lie upon my couch and am lifted to the topmost peak of a mountain
solitude. In vaporous essence, all the events of my mind and of my
heart rise from their recondite valleys and are a cloud about me. Solitude: at last I see your eyes. Deep and inscrutable and without
color they look at me and draw my marrow. Solitude, you are terrible
because you are so full of my own being. No other thing is there to
impede this flow of all my thoughts and all my passions into your
ghoulish void. Solitude, you are a horror because you are my self. And
this ... my self ... the air that I must breathe: and this ... my self
... the flesh that I must eat. Why has this been my fate? Have I not loved my mother and my father? How differed my childhood from another’s? Turmoil there is always,
moments of pain, flashes of anger, little understreams of injury
and resentment. I was ambitious. Even as a child, I felt that I
must prevail upon the world. And I was scarce a boy, when I knew my
instrument, and moved forth to fashion it; knowing that I must create
it, ere I could wield it. _To prevail by the truth._ Was that a sin? Who taught that that was sin? You are at fault, if that is sin ... all
you masters! You Greeks and Hebrews, you noblemen of the mind whose
past words are the body of our world. Why did you mislead me, if it is
sin for a young boy to say: “I will to live to learn, as a man may, the
truth.” ... But perhaps you also, even as now I ... found at the end of
your passage, Hell. Perhaps too late. Perhaps the gate of agony had
clamped you in, before you could send back to us a warning. The world that I have lost was sweet. Fondly I believed in it, devoutly
I was attached to my belief. The world is not well lost. But it is lost
indeed. How can I doubt that?