Chapter 40: Ultimate Peace

“Muchas vezes, Senor mio, considero que
si con algo se puede sustentar el virvir sin
vos, es en la soledad, porque descansa el
alma con su descanso.”
Sainte Theresa,
Exclamations of the Soul to its God.

“I was mistaken,” Hubert reflected, upon awaking. “This letter is full of interest, but I do not understand this need of railing at me in six small pages. And then to repeat at each line: ‘If you had known, if you had been able!’ Has she climbed on the stilts of her happiness! Yes, she is happy because a male has thrown himself at her and has nailed her on the cross. Ah! it will be necessary to rise, to carry it, to bend under the burden. Ah! it will bear you down and your lover will mount upwards and stamp his foot on you, for this retaliation is due you.

“Oh! I am not thirsty for vengeance and I do not desire to quench my thirst in the blood which will flow from your severed veins: I do not even wish to see you and I shut you out from my imagination.

“Only ... Ah! the wretch! She does not seem to suspect that I loved her! Everything, under the shelter of passional metaphysics, amounted to a question of adroit and decisive shrewdness. Yes, love is joiner’s work.

“And I go into the great absence, but with no mental reservations. I shall not conjure the superficial magics of Claudius Mamertinus; I have perfected them, but I shall use neither those nor my own. The great absence, as one speaks of the great desert, without water and without love! But the Egyptian woman lived there forty years with four tiny loaves of bread which she had bought at Jerusalem; she nibbled at them, when she was very hungry. I, too, shall gnaw at my memories, but not to excess, and without straining for grievous corporeal images. I wish to meditate in peace. Mark you, Sixtine, this is because of my greatness of soul, for I could have carried you off on my shoulders and thrown you into my cavern, where the bones of hyenas, dead of hunger, can be seen. You see that it is not cheerful. So I spare you this exile. Nevertheless, ‘you should know what corporeal vision is and you will refrain, when you think of your absent friend, from thinking him really absent. You think of him, and he appears before you corporeally, since you are thinking of his body (and how think of him otherwise, since the body is the sign of his existence and humanity?) And he will rise up before you, and likewise, across all obstacles, you will go into his presence, and he will see you.’ And the author of De Statu Animae (he also wrote the Pange, lingua: he was not a fool), after reflecting, adds: ‘Vision is the true function of the intelligent’; and ‘the image of things is their true reality.’