Still ill. Fog in the morning breaking into a wonderful pearl day of summer haze. Our bodily senses are instruments in our orchestra.
August 15.
Today I sank into Beauty several times in the sunlight.
August 16.
Read through the last proofs and on the dunes with my mother in the afternoon I lived in the light of God. The sun I caused to smile and I wrapped myself in the blue of the Virgin's sky. I found myself causing a shower twice by failing in humility. But the laughing Light of God's eyes in my soul is eternal, and when I submit it controls the tides of my body and mind. Tonight a woodpecker alighted on Father K——'s shoulder and stayed with him nearby. The Brahmin may attain to the shadow of the first syllable of the Word. He does not believe that there are others. Om is simply the symbol of inward breath, inspiration. I heard myself today very near to the Heart of Silence, whose systole and diastole is the ebb and flow of Love from Eternity to Eternity. Time is the sound of silence and is dead to all eternity. It is the only beautiful death that the angels do not mourn, for in the death of Time is the Redemption of the World. It takes the circle of eternity to unite the four points of the cross, and a crucifixion to unite two parallel lines.
August 17.
Out of the summer I am weaving the pattern web of the future in threads of desire. Every resurrection of a body is the last judgment of infinite planets, which fly to or flee from the human song of God's first syllable. Yet those that flee may be purchased by an infinite Redemption. This opens a terrible possibility of mercy. Is God continually becoming man for the love of His image? This is the joyful secret of God's sad fourth syllable. I clothe it in words to guard it from my intellect. Infinite incarnations prove time an illusion, since they make it eternity. God's Sacred Heart is the silent ocean beyond the universe. It reflects. The Incarnation is its flood. The Host tonight was more white than shining silver in a lonely pearl sky. It was Absolute Music unveiled to the human eye. Tonight I stood out for long alone with the stars, and watched a thunderstorm come over the sea. We must guard our dreams and intuitions not only from the intellects of others but most of all from our own. Yet our faith must be precisely bounded, although this boundary is to be none other than the infinite succession of points where time and eternity meet and bow down before God. This morning I saw His Beauty in a daisy. … I do not believe that God will reveal His mysteries if we seek to know them, without inflicting a penalty. The way of knowledge is the way of silent patience, which lies quietly dreaming of Love till the flood washes it with Living Light.
August 18.
Every time we look into another's soul we may enter Paradise. There is an indescribable grace in the air this first day of prescient autumn. The summer has taught me the secret of loneliness and the infinite way of satisfying its desire. To be alone with God we must be intimate with the beauty in the eyes of every face, and yet absolutely detached save from one's family and friend. Life's ideal is to see the end in the beginning, and act the road between. This is no other than the eternal life of the Alpha and Omega. But the essence of it in time is that the whole tide of humanity should ebb and flow in our breast. It requires a crucifixion to drink in all its saltness. I found the dunes beyond the lagoon this morning and sank into God in the wind of the sunlit blue. When I returned, the people were coming from Church. Tonight the Host was quivering gold, and as I write the planets are ringing in my ears. I pray that at the end I may come to the Heart of Eternal Silence.
August 19.