FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145  
146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   >>   >|  
not going to reply, he continued, almost bitterly, giving himself away: 'I can't say it is love I have to offer--and it isn't love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder--and rarer.' There was a silence, out of which she said: 'You mean you don't love me?' She suffered furiously, saying that. 'Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn't true. I don't know. At any rate, I don't feel the emotion of love for you--no, and I don't want to. Because it gives out in the last issues.' 'Love gives out in the last issues?' she asked, feeling numb to the lips. 'Yes, it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn't. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does NOT meet and mingle, and never can.' She watched him with wide, troubled eyes. His face was incandescent in its abstract earnestness. 'And you mean you can't love?' she asked, in trepidation. 'Yes, if you like. I have loved. But there is a beyond, where there is not love.' She could not submit to this. She felt it swooning over her. But she could not submit. 'But how do you know--if you have never REALLY loved?' she asked. 'It is true, what I say; there is a beyond, in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as stars are beyond the scope of vision, some of them.' 'Then there is no love,' cried Ursula. 'Ultimately, no, there is something else. But, ultimately, there IS no love.' Ursula was given over to this statement for some moments. Then she half rose from her chair, saying, in a final, repellent voice: 'Then let me go home--what am I doing here?' 'There is the door,' he said. 'You are a free agent.' He was suspended finely and perfectly in this extremity. She hung motionless for some seconds, then she sat down again. 'If there is no love, what is there?' she cried, almost jeering. 'Something,' he said, looking at her, battling with his soul, with all his might. 'What?' He was silent for a long time, unable to be in communication with her while she was in this state of opposition. 'There is,' he said, in a voice of pure abstraction; 'a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145  
146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

impersonal

 

Ursula

 
issues
 

submit

 

repellent

 
vision
 

ultimately

 
statement
 
Ultimately
 

moments


battling
 

opposition

 

unable

 

communication

 

silent

 

Something

 

abstraction

 

responsibility

 

perfectly

 
finely

suspended
 

extremity

 

jeering

 
motionless
 
seconds
 

Because

 

feeling

 
emotion
 

emotional

 

relationship


influence
 

Though

 

giving

 
bitterly
 

continued

 

suffered

 

furiously

 

silence

 

harder

 
delude

abstract

 
earnestness
 

incandescent

 
trepidation
 
REALLY
 

swooning

 
troubled
 

isolation

 

branches

 
isolated