-admit it--more beautiful.... To love
you is to think perfection, nobility, light, and to stretch my hands out
to them. It is nothing else.

"To go to him is to continue myself; it is not to lessen you.

"But.... Is it the dusk or the reflection of the tree? Your cheeks are
ashen, your eyes are quite wet, and in spite of everything, in spite of
everything I am hurting you.... At the moment that you love like a God,
you suffer like a man....

"It is because our understanding is a high one that your grief is deep
and my confession necessary.

"If you knew, if you knew....

"You see, I still tremble before stopping just as I hesitated before
sitting down, because once my confession is made we shall both feel that
it is closed forever.

"Does one ever know whether one has not omitted the essential word, the
life word, the one that means everything and has not been said? I no
longer know. It is as if I still had it within me....

"Let me stay where I am, near you, for a long time. You will let my head
rest on your knees, the night will succeed better than I in revealing
the heart unseen.

"Perhaps he has come already.... Tell me ... do you hear him?"

XXI

How happy I was!... I listened without stirring to the deep throbbing of
his life. I came to know him better through the regular pulsing of his
neck, the twisting of his arms and the warmth that passed between us
than through our past meetings. All the warm invisible things that work
in the depths of a human being, the changing fate, the mystery
circulating in the blood, were talking into my ears.

Here we were alongside each other, breathing in unison--can you have
enough of such happiness? I entrusted my entire being to him; it was a
pure, holy fulfilment.

* * * * *

There's no use trying to sum matters up differently. It may be that at
death you find the higher expression, the illumination so sought for,
but the living have no other way of saying the truth to each other than
through the flesh.

* * * * *

You understand, don't you, that you have to rest from living? No longer
to have this gaping heart, this pitiless, relentless love, but simply to
lie stretched out close against him, so that the whole universe comes
rushing to you, the mystery reveals itself, and life finds
consolation.... Does God ever bestow greater charity?

* * * * *

I have just gi