Then, a human being never knows what another human being gives him?
Physical love joins nothing, leaves nothing. Nevertheless, it seems to bring everything, and it does bring everything at the red moment of embrace.
The joy at which I grasped has departed; my lips are dry, my arms empty.
Yet a little while ago I thought I was going to live like God. And to have had the hope of living like God for a single instant is in itself beautiful enough.
XXII
"You really want to know what I am thinking of? And why I look so obstinate with my eyebrows projecting like a black roof over my eyes?
"I was working out an idea, the sort of idea that seems silly when you try to express it, but is really quite reasonable and logical....
"Why do you insist upon my telling you? I assure you it's so simple that you, a man, won't understand.
"Well then. I was thinking of your wife.... No, don't interrupt ... the woman who shares your name, your home, your meals, the money you earn, your cares; the woman who lives beside you—here's the one wrong—in utter ignorance of your love for me.
"I was imagining—this is where the vagary commences—a meeting between the two of us, not a meeting of constrained smiles, not the confrontation of two human beings, with elements of the dramatic and the divine. Do try to follow me. Put together the details I am going to give you one by one the way they are in reality. Give the extraordinary interview the ordinary setting of humble, banal, tame everydayness. I told you it was a silly notion.