Twice the door almost opened. I sprang in spirit to cross the threshold, and there was—nothing. The door was slammed in my face, but I never forgot that I had nearly got through. It was like death. As if one's brain and heart had suddenly grown vast and vapourized. Pater's book rouses some echo of those sensations.
I can't define what the other life is. It is all around me. I feel it in the water when I swim—a sentiency. If I could only look close enough into the shifting depths, I should see—a hand clasped quickly enough would grasp—what always just evades.
I feel it around me, breathing and watching in the woods. It is what I cannot quite catch in the talk of the birds. It is what the animals say with their eyes.
The Greeks understood it. They called it Pan, and Cybele, and Dionysus, or dryads in the woods, or nymphs in the fountain, but those were only terms by which they tried to express the inexpressible. It is so subtle—so intoxicating. It is like love—a reblending with all the elements of nature. One aches and strains toward it, and yet feels a delicious, shuddering reluctance to know.
January 7.
At Time of Death.
Oh High Heart of mine,
Now list to a wonder!
Thou shalt vent thy great rages
In lightning and thunder.
And the force of thy fury, more mighty than they,
Shall rock mountains, and rip them asunder.
When thou weepest, oh Heart!
All thy bitter deploring
In the white whirling rains
Shall have anguished outpouring.
And the salt and the sound of thy grief, like the sea,
Shake the night with its sullen wild roaring.