reat tomb of
the churches. There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of
living.

There is no mysterious fire. I have stolen the truth. I have stolen
the whole truth. I have seen sacred things, tragic things, pure
things, and I was right. I have seen shameful things, and I was right.
And so I have entered the kingdom of truth, if, while preserving
respect to truth and without soiling it, we can use the expression that
deceit and religious blasphemy employ.

. . . . .

Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple
Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our
doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell
everything, who will have the genius to see everything?

I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will
be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the
more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain
memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes
I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece.
Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so
strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a
forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried
out.

But I have stolen all this, and I have profited by it, thanks to the
shamelessness of the truth revealed. At the point in space in which,
by accident, I found myself, I had only to open my eyes and to stretch
out my mendicant hands to accomplish more than a dream, to accomplish
almost a work.

What I have seen is going to disappear, since I shall do nothing with
it. I am like a mother the fruit of whose womb will perish after it
has been born.

What matter? I have heard the annunciation of whatever finer things
are to come. Through me has passed, without staying me in my course,
the Word which does not lie, and which, said over again, will satisfy.

. . . . .

But I have finished. I am lying stretched out, and now that I have
ceased to see, my poor eyes close like a healing wound and a scar forms
over them.

And I seek assuagement for myself. I! The last cry, as it was the
first.

As for me, I have only one recourse, to remember and to believe. To
hold on with all my strength to the memory of the tragedy of the Room.

I believe that the only thing which confronts the heart and the reason
is the shadow of that which the hea