What have you seen with your eyes?” asked the old woman. “What have you seen that you knew should not be there?
His beauty has always maddened me. I think I idealize him in my mind when I’m not with him; but then when I see him again I’m overcome.
And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life.
So you’re saying that demons aren’t as smart as angels.” “Perhaps they could be,” he said, “but their state of mind interferes with their intelligence. It interferes with their observations, and their conclusions. It interferes with everything that they do. Theirs is a hideous predicament. They refuse to admit that they have lost.” That was beautiful. I liked it. I liked the puzzle of it and the truth of it.
But joy, the joy you’ve known, the love you’ve known, that is what matters, and we, the conscious ones, the ones who can grieve, only we can know joy.
I’m not myself,” I added hesitantly. “I haven’t survived all this as well as I should have survived it. My body’s healed – the old miracle. But I don’t understand my present view of things. The bitterness. the utter darkness. Never has life itself seemed so senseless. It’s a joke, isn’t it? Consciousness, it’s a kind of joke.
When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.
You will learn as you get older, my dear girl, that not everyone reads as you do. Not everyone has the same encounter with language. There is a heightened sensitivity in you, to be sure, but you can embrace it. It’s far more than just a nervous condition, these tears you shed when you read of Cleopatra and Marc Antony’s fall. You are a rare and beautiful thing, Sibyl. For most people, words are just symbols for sounds, made on paper. For you, they can create all new worlds in your mind.
In a daze, I saw him stretch out his arms to me. It struck me that never in all my life had I beheld anyone quite as beautiful as he was, and it was not merely the sum of his physical attributes, it was the pure serenity, the essence that I perceived with my innermost soul. A lovely euphoria came over me as he spoke.
There’s an old story,” he said, “about a saint who once said, ‘Even when the Prince of Darkness takes the form of an angel of light, you’ll know him by his reptilian tail.
And do stop trying to determine if I am a man or a woman. The fact is I’m a good part both and therefore neither one. I was just explaining to your Aunt Queen. I was born endowed with the finest traits of both sexes and I drift this way and that as I choose.
Carefully I opened my eyes and looked at him again. All his natural gifts were there in a blaze of light: the delicate but strong limbs, large sober brown eyes, and his mouth that for all the irony and sarcasm that could come out of it was childlike and ready to be kissed.
Don’t cling to reason so desperately in a world of so many horrid contradictions.
In perfect understanding, it seemed, they looked at each other. Questions of failure, of haste, all the what if’s of life, did not matter. The quiet in her was talking to the quiet in him.
Elegant presents soon followed. Leather luggage for Jesse’s travels and a lovely mink-lined coat to keep her warm in the ‘abominable British weather.’ It is a country ‘only a Druid could love,’ Maharet wrote.
And won’t the world be better if no one is ever again burnt in the name of God?” I asked. “If there is no more faith in God to make men do that to each other? What is the danger in a secular world where horrors like that don’t happen?
We seek to perfect what we are, not to constantly alter it. We seek to find something that is a true expression of our soul with which to shape what makes up our form. But there’s no need for you to trouble yourself over these things.
One time Gifford had asked Mona: “What’s the difference between men and women?” Mona had said: “Men don’t know what can happen. They’re happy. But women know everything that can happen. They worry all the time.
Of course there is a way to stop the rampant spread of beauty. It has to do with regimentation, conformity, assemblyline aesthetics, and the triumph of the functional over the haphazard.
The idea was simply that there was somebody who knew everything, somebody who had seen everything. I did not mean by this that a Supreme Being existed, but rather that there was on earth a continual intelligence, a continual awareness. And I thought of it in practical terms that excited me and soothed me simultaneously.