to your uttermost limits, forget your own existence, and discard all
past gestures. They were all inadequate. You don't want to retain any of
them except the gesture you would make here--spread your arms while
walking and hold your hands open like two pure, empty chalices.

Complete blackness now. You can no longer distinguish between silence
and space, fear and the rustling; all things are merged in each other,
trees with trees, their masses with the slope, and the slope, deprived
of its contours, with the sky, which has come down to join the earth.
Everything is blended, obliterated. The very cypresses, during the
daytime a spear thrust at the azure, are also added to the darkness.

Beneath our eyes, tired from not seeing anything, the road kindly
extends its vaporous pallor. Except for the road no line to arrest the
impulse within, no perspective. The only clear things, our own figures.

We have never before entered such solitude together, nor ever before
been laid so bare to each other. It makes us walk slowly and solemnly,
as if we were passing beneath the eye of God.

* * * * *

The idea of us as a couple. We. We two.

Must an idea, then, remain implanted in the hearts of human beings in
order to keep them upright? If I did not feel the pulsing of my love
constraining me to live, the night, with no reason to respect my spirit,
would stretch me out, I fancy, on any chance slope beneath the large
serenity.

But I am upheld. Every intake of fresh air gives a new thrill and a
youthful vigor to the idea in my heart, and I feel it mounting so
swiftly that I must run to keep up with it. So as to hold it fast for
my protection I rake together my loveliest recollections. Are my
loveliest recollections those of our nights in each other's arms, our
kisses, the storm that beat against our bodies?... No, they are not. As
I raise my eyes to where the firmament should be--if it still exists--I
find the blessed peacefulness which comes from his presence. The
sentiment that grips my heart when I feel myself taking part in his life
is lofty. It has something in it of respect, and trust, and pity; it is
hard to say just what. It spurs me to action, even to boldness, and it
raises around me a strong wall in which I am secure.

This is not a recollection; it is a bit of the future, and the future
alone is what you discover as you go forward into the infinite. At one
bound you mount to the summi