happy only because
I had been ignorant of what real happiness was--not really happy. I
thought of a bird born in a cage and singing there. I had been as that
bird. And then, when I was in the garden, I looked at the swallows
winging their way high in the sunshine, between the garden trees and the
radiant blue, winging their way towards sea and mountains and plains,
and that bitterness, like an acid that burns and eats away fine metal,
was once more at my heart.

"But the sensation of loneliness was the most terrible of all. I
compared union with God, such as I thought I had known, with that other
union spoken of by my guest--union with the human being one loves. I set
the two unions as it were in comparison. Night after night I did this.
Night after night I told over the joys of union with God--joys which
I dared to think I had known--and the joys of union with a loved human
being. On the one side I thought of the drawing near to God in prayer,
of the sensation of approach that comes with earnest prayer, of the
feeling that ears are listening to you, that the great heart is loving
you, the great heart that loves all living things, that you are being
absolutely understood, that all you cannot say is comprehended, and
all you say is received as something precious. I recalled the joy, the
exaltation, that I had known when I prayed. That was union with God.
In such union I had sometimes felt that the world, with all that it
contained of wickedness, suffering and death, was utterly devoid of
power to sadden or alarm the humblest human being who was able to draw
near to God.

"I had had a conquering feeling--not proud--as of one upborne, protected
for ever, lifted to a region in which no enemy could ever be, no
sadness, no faint anxiety even.

"Then I strove to imagine--and this, Domini, was surely a deliberate
sin--exactly what it must be to be united with a beloved human being. I
strove and I was able. For not only did instinct help me, instinct
that had been long asleep, but--I have told you that the stranger was
suffering under an obsession, a terrible dominion. This dominion he
described to me with an openness that perhaps--that indeed I believe--he
would not have shown had I not been a monk. He looked upon me as a being
apart, neither man nor woman, a being without sex. I am sure he did.
And yet he was immensely intelligent. But he knew that I had entered the
monastery as a novice, that I had been there through all m