That was what we wanted to know. She confirms it, and her signal, to whomever it was made, carries farther than she would guess. It is understood. The past for some of us now is our only populous and habitable world, invisible to others, but alive with whispers for us. Yet the sea still moves daily along the old foreshore, and ships still go and come, and do not, like us, run aground on what now is not there.
OF PROSE
A FRAGMENT[30]
[30] Translated from the Dutch by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos.
By LODEWIJK VAN DEIJSSEL
I love the prose that comes towards me like a man, with sparkling eyes, with a loud voice, breathing hard and with great gestures of the hands. I want to hear the writer laugh and cry in it, to hear him whisper and shout, to feel him sigh and pant. I want his language to loom up before me like a tangible and resounding organism; I want him, when I read him in my room, to reveal to me, from the characters that shimmer before my eyes, a spirit that enters into me and seems to ascend within me from out of his pages.
I love the prose that comes rolling up from the infinity of the artist's soul, like a sea of sound, flowing calmly with its wide waves, drawing nearer, nearer, ever nearer, smooth and broad, suddenly illumined by intense gleams of light.
I love the prose that clashes towards me, rushes up to me, thunders down upon me in a raging torrent of passion.