And if he only bespoke me in thunderous preludes touching souls’ triumphant apotheoses—bold and intolerable ecstasies beyond heaven’s last poignantest door—it would be nothing to my purpose. Those my poet-brain can make for me if I wish. But I’d like God to explain me the little frightful puzzles which thrive all around me in the wide daylight of this knife-and-fork-ness.
God might come walking lightly in and perhaps seat himself fastidiously in my chastest chair. He might cross one knee over the other. He might adjust his monocle and regard me through it speculatively or sadly or politely-wearily. I should be outwardly calm but I might feel an inward panic: lest he go away again without having told me a fact.
I might say to God: ‘God, if you please, this small blue vase on my window-sill—I see it and I touch it and I love it—will you tell me, you who know, is there a blue vase there or is there no vase?’
And God might merely glance at the vase through his glass and daintily hold his white handkerchief crumpled-up in his gray-gloved fingers and might merely say: ‘Madame, you have eyes with which to see the vase and hands with which to touch it and sentiments to lend it charm for you, no doubt. Then why not let them inform you as to its actuality?’
And then I might say, with a weariness equal to God’s: ‘My senses are pleasant—they are sweet—but they do not inform me, or they inform me wrong. Because they don’t plainly tell me whether it’s a Blue Vase [or] a Blue Shadow—just for that I burn in little disconcerting hell-fires, and vulture-thoughts with beaks and talons come and tear me in the night, and I starve and decay trivially, and my life is a flattish ruin and a tasteless darkness and a slight shallow death, a death in the sunshine—I am fed-up with a sense of death because of pricking doubts as to my blue vase’s realness.’
To which, again, God might reply with his head tilted to one side, tranquil and impersonal: ‘As to that, Madame, there may be less death in doubt than in certainty about your vase. You might in discovering it discover in yourself no right whatever to the sunshine—no right to live in it, no right to die in it.’
And I might answer, with some insolent feeling: ‘I should wish to discover the fact about it though it proved to me I don’t exist and never existed—that I’m a dust on a moth’s wing, and at that alien—not belonging there.’
Upon which God, for what I know, might only shrug-the-shoulders.
In that identity he might shrug-the-shoulders or break-the-world with equal omnipotent plausibleness.
But I might try again. I might say: ‘One thing feels realer than my blue vase—this blue-and-green Necklace which my Soul wears. It is rare and recherché but my beautiful Soul is very tired from wearing it. Will you please unclasp it for me?’