ven him my life, my body, my very depths, and he is gone
to sleep.

Then, a human being never knows what another human being gives him?

Physical love joins nothing, leaves nothing. Nevertheless, it seems to
bring everything, and it does bring everything at the red moment of
embrace.

The joy at which I grasped has departed; my lips are dry, my arms empty.

Yet a little while ago I thought I was going to live like God. And to
have had the hope of living like God for a single instant is in itself
beautiful enough.

XXII

"You really want to know what I am thinking of? And why I look so
obstinate with my eyebrows projecting like a black roof over my eyes?

"I was working out an idea, the sort of idea that seems silly when you
try to express it, but is really quite reasonable and logical....

"Why do you insist upon my telling you? I assure you it's so simple that
you, a man, won't understand.

"Well then. I was thinking of your wife.... No, don't interrupt ... the
woman who shares your name, your home, your meals, the money you earn,
your cares; the woman who lives beside you--here's the one wrong--in
utter ignorance of your love for me.

"I was imagining--this is where the vagary commences--a meeting between
the two of us, not a meeting of constrained smiles, not the
confrontation of two human beings, with elements of the dramatic and the
divine. Do try to follow me. Put together the details I am going to give
you one by one the way they are in reality. Give the extraordinary
interview the ordinary setting of humble, banal, tame everydayness. I
told you it was a silly notion.

* * * * *

"I go to visit her. The interview takes place amid her familiar
accustomed things, which assist and protect her. She sits beside the
window--her little sewing-table, her work-basket, a dozen scattered
articles. She sews without thinking of much, in the broad daylight so
dazzlingly brilliant that you can't see the swing of the pendulum. Her
head is bent, the sunlight grazes her neck. You feel her spirit is with
her needle and thread, that is, crystallized in calm. Her tranquillized
body submits in advance to the impending visit. She has only to lift her
eyes to know the limits set to her being, the very boundary-line of
everything she awaits.

* * * * *

"I enter. I go to her. My steps erect a hedge of sound around me. To
make myself seen I raise my voice...