“Ah, but I didn’t say that Reality was meaningless. It has all possible meaning for itself, no doubt; it’s our meaning for it that is so unpleasantly ambiguous. We are in it and for it, as if we were the kaleidoscope it turned, the picture it looked at; and we are and must be what it thinks or sees. Your musical simile expressed it very nicely: Reality an eternal symphony and our personalities the notes in it—discords to our own limited consciousness, but to Reality necessary parts of the perfect whole. Reality is just that will to contemplate, to think, the infinite variety of life, and it usually thinks us as wanting to live. All ethics, all religions, are merely records of the ceasing of this want. A man comes to see himself as discord, and with the seeing the discord is resolved to silence. One comes to see as the Reality sees, and since it is perfectly satisfied, although it is perhaps quite unconscious,—or so some people who think a great deal about it say,—we, in partaking of its vision, find in unconsciousness the goal, and are satisfied.”
“You are satisfied with such a death in life?” Eppie asked in her steady voice.
“What you call life is what I call death, perhaps, Eppie.”
“Your metaphysics may be very cheap; I know very little about them. But if all that were true, I should still say that the illusion is more real than that nothingness—for to us such a reality would be nothingness. And I should say, let us live our reality all the more intensely, since, for us, there is no other.”
“How you care for life,” said Gavan, as he had said it once before. He looked at her marching through the mist like a defiant Valkyrie.
“Care for it? I’ve hated it at times, the bits that came to me.”
“Yet you want it, always.”
“Always,” she repeated. “Always. I have passed a great part of my life in being very unhappy—that is to say, in wanting badly something I’ve not got. Yet I am more glad than I can say to have lived.”
“Probably because you still expect to get what you want.”
“Of course.” She smiled a little now, though a veiled, ambiguous smile. And as they began the steep descent, the mist infolding them more closely, even the semblance of the smile faded, leaving a new sadness.