I do not want from God a passport, a safe-conduct into heaven. I don’t want to get into heaven. I don’t know what it is, but the word has sounds of finality, as if all winds, sweet nervous petal-laden winds, had stopped blowing forever. For cycles and centuries to come the Soul of me will be too restless to live where winds can not blow.
I love the journey: so that only I might have one dim torch to go by. I love the pitfalls and ditches—all the dangers—black-shaded woods and wolds, and lonesome plains and briery paths, and very wet swamps, and strong whistling gales which chill me: so that I could feel but one tiny bright-bladed truth, within and without, pricking and urging me to struggle on through it all till I might emerge at last like a human being, rather than linger indifferent and inanimate like a jaded wood-nymph in drearily pleasant spaces.
[Twenty inches of ajarness]
To-morrow
GOD might come to visit me on a Monday afternoon.
He would come in at the door of my blue-white room which had been left about twenty inches ajar: for I cannot imagine God, the aloof and reticent, opening a shut door to visit anyone. It is as if God purposely lacks all initiative. If I wish to meet God I must first suffer deeps of terror and passion and loneliness to make the mood that wants it. Then I must train my life down to two plain frocks. And to crown all my room-door must be left ajar on the day he happens to come or he will not come in. That seems certain: but for twenty inches of ajarness at my door he will not come in.
In it God is quite fair. I do the reaching-out and I live out the despairs: he furnishes a fact to go upon: I go upon it, in some anguish doubtless: but then mine, not God’s, are the lights and the translated splendor. It is a ‘gentleman’s game’ God plays. It is because I feel that to be true, more than for that he is the Dealer, that I would have a word with him.
On a Monday afternoon—
He might come in the figure of a precise mystic-looking little old man, punctilious of dress and manner like an English duke on the stage. He might wear overwhelmingly correct afternoon attire, with spats and a monocle on a wide ribbon. It someway fills my peculiar trivial concepts of God: mystic-seeming because he is the God of the dead dusty hosts of Israel, and punctiliously modern because he is also the God of new-poeted radium-gifted Now. A God like a druid or like Aladdin’s genie, such as I fancied as a child, or like Jove or Vulcan, would seem an inadequate and unsuitable God. What would such a one know of the shape and fashion of my two plain dresses, and of my shoes, and my breakfasts, and the charmed surface joy in the back of a magazine? God, to be God to me, must know all those things.