Yes, so it was, and though the night-breeze were ever so warm, ever so mild, though it were ever so cool as it streamed through the windows, even though it gathered all terrestrial things in its tides, olive-groves and wheat harvest and vineyards and fishing-banks, uniting as into a whole the undulant night-breath of lands and seas, bearing and mingling their harvests in the mild hand of the wind, and though this softly-blowing hand drooped ever so dulcetly, stroking across the streets and squares, cooling the faces, sundering the smoke, appeasing the ardor, yes, though this floating breath, with which the form of night was filled to its outermost surface, had even swelled beyond it, transformed into trembling cave-mountains, which beyond all conception, scarcely even external, rested in our innermost depths, within the heart and deeper than the heart, within the soul and deeper than the soul, in our innermost self that had become one with the night, yes, even though all this were so and continued to be so, it was of no use, the time for it was past, it was no longer of use. The sleep of the herds remained pregnant with evil, the earthly raging still unappeased, the fire unquenchable, and love delivered over to the lightning blast of nothingness, while timeless above the cave of night the tempest thunders.

Flight, oh, flight! The mother was past invoking. We were orphaned when the herd came into being, we could invoke no name in our dreams, none had identity in the darkness of utter fusion—, and you, my little night-mate who have attached yourself to me as a guide, are you still there at my call? is it by your fate or mine that you are sent to me that I may talk to you? do you feel that you too are menaced by timelessness? is it hidden under your night as well?—and was it for this reason that you came to me? oh lean against me, my little twin-brother, oh lean against me; I turn away my eyes from the menace, I turn them to you in hope, hoping for the last time to return from my plight, hoping to return with you into the dark cavern which has been built in myself like a homestead I no longer know, oh, be lodged with me in this closeness that beats in my veins like something long estranged and now rewelcomed, and that I would fain have you share with me: then it may come to pass that even the most unfamiliar, that even myself will no longer seem strange to me; oh nestle close to me, my little twin-brother, nestle close, and should you lament your lost childhood, your lost mother, you shall find them again with me as I take you into my arms and into my care. Once more let us tarry in the floating cavern of night, but once again and together let us hearken to its dream-tremors, let us hearken to the “nevertheless” of its interrealm and its sweet reality—, you do not know yet, my little brother, for you are too young, from what profound depths within us the nightly hope mounts upward, so all-embracing, so whole-souled in its tenacity, with such tender-soft promise of yearning in its very distress that it takes us long to hear its hope and its dismay, which surround us like a mountain-chain of echoes, echo-wall on echo-wall, like an unknown landscape and yet like the summoning of our very hearts, yes “nevertheless and nevertheless” and still with such sovereignty as if the complete reflection of a past, long since lived through, would gleam out freshly and yet as unfaltering as though it contained all covenants of consummation—, oh little brother I have experienced it because I have become an old man, older than my years, because I sense every fragility and taint in myself, I have experienced it because I am coming to the end; ah, it is only when we begin to long for death that we really desire life, and in me the undermining, the frame-slackening process of an avidity for death goes on, never pausing, as far back as I can remember, clamoring ceaselessly, thus have I always felt it, anxiety for life and anxiety for death together, in these many nights on the threshold of which I have stood, on the strand of nights and more nights that have gushed past me, the awareness of them gushing and swelling, knowledge of separation and farewell that had its beginning with the dusk, and it was dying, every sort of dying, that coursed past me, grazing me with its mounting flood, saturating me, encircling me, coming from without yet born from within me, my own dying: only the dying understand communion, understand love, understand the interrealm, only in the dusk and at farewell do we understand sleep whose darkest communion is without wantonness, not until farewell do we know that our departure will be followed by no return, not until then do we recognize the seed of wantonness which lies embedded in returning and only in returning; ah, my little nightmate, you too will understand this one day, you will wait on the thresholding shore, on the shore of your interrealm, on the shore of farewell and dusk, and your ship too will be ready for flight, for that proud flight which is called awakening, and from which there is no return. Dream, oh dream! As long as we are at our versing we do not go away, as long as we remain steadfast in the interrealm of our night-day we present one another with every dream-hope, with all longed-for communion, with every hope of love, and therefore, my little brother, for the sake of that hope, for the sake of that yearning, never again depart from me. I have no wish to know your name, your shadow-casting name, I will not summon you, neither for the setting-out nor for the return, but uncallable and uncalled, abide with me so that love may abide in the covenant of its fulfillment, abide with me in the dusk, abide with me on the shore of the stream which we will behold without entrusting ourselves to it, far from its source, far from its estuary, shielded from the dim fusion of inception, shielded from the final, shadowless identification with Apollo’s brightness; oh, abide with me, sheltering and sheltered, as I shall bide with you forevermore; once again, love: do you hear me? do you hear what I am asking? is my plea still able to hear your answer, while answering itself, fate-delivered, divested of sorrow?

Or had it become too late?

The night lay without motion, formfast in its near and far apparence, locked here into this room, locked into ever-widening spaces, extending from the vicinity of the tangible to always further frontiers, away over mountains and seas, extended in a constant outflow even unto the unreachable dream-caverns, and this flood, springing from the heart, breaking at the periphery of the dream-caverns and flowing back from there into the heart, received the yearning into itself wave upon wave, dissolving even the yearning for yearning, bringing to a standstill the shrouded swaying of the maternal star-cradle where it began, and encircled by flashes of the dark lightnings below, of the bright ones above, it parted into light and darkness, into murk and glare; two-toned the cloud, twofold the source, thunder-close, soundless, spaceless, timeless—oh, riven cave of the inner and outer life, oh, mighty on-going earth!—, thus the night yawned wide, being’s slumber was snapped, dusk and poetry had been silently rinsed away, their realm rinsed away, the echo-wall of dreams shattered, and mocked by the silent voices of memory, guilt-laden and hopeless, inundated by the flood, washed away on the flood, life’s over-great travail sank to sheer nothingness. It had become too late, there was nothing left but flight, the ship lay ready, the anchor was being lifted; it was too late.

Yet he waited, waited for the night to make its presence known, to croon him something final and comforting, once again with its meandering to awake his yearning. It could scarcely be called hope, rather a hoping for hope, scarcely any longer flight from timelessness, rather a flight from the flight. There was no more time, no more yearning, no more hope either for living or dying; there was no more night. There was scarcely any more waiting, at the most some impatience for the awaited impatience. He held his hands tightly clasped, the thumb of the left one touching the stone of his ring, thus he sat there, feeling the warmth of the boy’s shoulder which was shoved within leaning-distance yet not touching his knee, and he had a great longing to loosen his cramped fingers from their increasing spasm so that with imperceptible delicacy he might stroke the night-dark, tousled, childish hair on which he looked down, so that he might let the duskily sprouting night-human in the dark-soft crackling bloom glide between his fingers—night-yearning for yearning; however he made no move, but at length, although it cost him dear to break the tension of expectancy, he said: “It is too late.” Slowly, the boy lifted up his countenance full of understanding and questioning as if something had been read to him the sequel of which must follow, and in heed to this questioning, his own face gently approaching that of the boy, he repeated very softly: “It is too late.” Was there still some expectation? was he disappointed that the night no longer stirred and only the boy’s eyes, gray, childish, steadfast, remained fixed upon him, they too questioning. The impatience which he had wished for suddenly appeared: “Yes, it is late … go to the festival.” Of a sudden he felt excessively old, and the immediate and earthly manifested itself in the need for sleep and drowsiness, in the need, slumber-wrapt and unconscious, to forget that No-more; it manifested itself with the slackening of the lower jaw and furthermore with so violent a compulsion to cough that the wish to remain alone and unobserved became imperative: “Go … go … to the feast,” he brought out hoarsely, while his upturned palm only by a gesture and from a growing distance pushed the reluctantly departing boy in short shoves toward the door. “Go … go,” the words rattled in him again, his breath already failing, and when he was actually alone it seemed as if black lightning struck into his breast from which the coughing broke out mixed with night-blood, robbing him of consciousness; sprawling, shaken and benumbed, cleaving and bursting, a strangling convulsion on the edge of the abyss, and that he had not been hurled into it this time, that it had passed him by once more, that he could hear again the drizzling of the fountain, the crackling of the candles appeared to him afterwards like a miracle. With no little trouble he had dragged himself from the armchair over to the bed, had let himself fall into it, and remained lying there motionless.

Again he held his hands clasped tightly, again he felt the stone of the ring, felt the winged figure of the genius that was engraved into the polished carnelian, and he waited, hearkening whether it would turn to life or to death. Then slowly it was better, he came again, even though still slowly, with much pain and exertion, to breathing, to peace, to silence.

FIRE—THE DESCENT

HE LAY AND LISTENED. FROM TIME TO TIME, ALTHOUGH at greater intervals and with no new showing of blood, the seizure came on again and at first he had even thought he should call the slave from the next room to summon the doctor; but calling cost effort, and to be disturbed by the physician would have been unbearable: he wanted to be alone—, nothing was more pressing than to remain by oneself, again and again to gather all existence within one so that one would be able to listen; this was all-important. He rolled on his side, his legs drawn up a little, his head resting on the pillow, the hip pressed into the mattress, the knees disposed one above the other like two beings alien to him, and very far off in the distance reposed the ankles and the heels as well. How often, oh, how often in the past had he been intent on the phenomenon of lying down! Yes, it was absolutely shameful that he could not rid himself of this childish habit! He recalled distinctly the very night when he—an eight year old—had become conscious that there was something noteworthy in the mere act of reclining; it was in Cremona, the time was winter; he lay in his room, the door which led to the peristyle was cracked, closed badly, and moved a little in an eerie manner; outside the wind rustled over the flower-beds, straw-covered for winter, and from somewhere, possibly from the swinging lantern under the doorway, the faint reflection of a light in pendular rhythm came gliding into the chamber like the last reverberation of an eternal tide, like the last reverberation of eternally changing eras, like the last reflection of an infinitely distant eye, so lost, so broken, so threatening in its remoteness, so fraught with distance that it was a challenge to question oneself as to the reality or unreality of one’s own existence—, and just as then, though intensified and made more familiar by the subsequent, sedulous, nightly repetition, even today he felt every single point of support by which his couch carried him, and just as then they were wave-crests over which his ship skimmed, dipping lightly into them, while wave-hollows of unfathomable depth appeared between them. Certainly this was not the main concern, and if now he had wished to be alone it had not been in order to continue childish observations which he could have done without more ado while still retaining the little night-mate; no, it was for something more essential, for something more conclusive, for something the reality of which must be very great, so great that it must surpass even poetry and its interrealm, it was for something that had to be more real than dusk or night, surpassing them by its heightened reality even in earthiness, it was for something that made it worth while to gather all existence within oneself, and it was only to be wondered at that childishness and its irrelevance did not permit itself to be pushed further back, that it was still present with its succession of images just as of yore, that in the chain of memory into which we are forged the first links should be the strongest, as if they, just they, were the most real reality. It seemed almost impossible, nay more, it seemed almost inadmissible that our last-attained, our most real reality could limit itself thus to becoming a mere recollective image! Nevertheless human life was thus image-graced and imagecursed; it could comprehend itself only through images, the images were not to be banished, they had been with us since the herd-beginning, they were anterior to and mightier than our thinking, they were timeless, containing past and future, they were a twofold dream-memory and they were more powerful than we: an image to himself was he who lay there, and steering toward the most real reality, borne on invisible waves, dipping into them, the image of the ship was his own image emerging from darkness, heading toward darkness sinking into darkness, he himself was the boundless ship that at the same time was boundlessness; and he himself was the flight that was aiming toward this boundlessness; he was the fleeing ship, he himself the goal, he himself was boundlessness too vast to be seen, unimaginable, an endless corporeal landscape, the landscape of his body, a mighty, outspread, infernal image of night, so that deprived of the unity of human life, deprived of the unity of human yearning, he no longer believed himself capable of self-mastery, conscious as he was of the separated regions and provinces over which the essential ego had been compelled to distribute itself, conscious of a demonic possession that had assumed direction in his stead, isolated into districts in all their diversity; ah there were the disrupted, ploughed-up districts of the hurting lung, there were those of the distressing fever that wavered up to the skin from unknown, red-glowing depths and there were the districts of the bowel abysses, just as there were the more terrifying ones of sex, one like the other filled with serpents, intergrown with serpents, there were the districts of the limbs with their unbridled innate life, not last there were those of the fingers and all these districts of the demons, some of them settled near him, others at a greater distance, some of them more friendly, others hostile among themselves as well as toward him—nearest to him, belonging most intimately to him were still the senses, the eyes and ears and their districts—, all these domains of the physical and extra-physical, enveloping the hard and earthly reality of the skeleton, they were known to him in their complete strangeness, in their disintegrated fragility, in their remoteness, in their animosity, in their incomprehensible infinity, sensual and supra-sensual, for all together, and he along with them as by their mutual knowledge, were imbedded in that great flood that extended over everything human, everything oceanic, in that homing surge and the heavy swing of its ebb and flow which beats so constantly on the coast of the heart and keeps it throbbing so continuously, image of reality and reality of image in one, so wave-deep that the most disparate things are swept together within it, not quite unified but still united for future rebirth; oh surf on the shore of cognition, its ever-mounting tide brimming with the seeds of all comfort, all hope, oh, night-laden, seed-laden, space-laden flood of spring; and filled with the empowering vision of his real self, he knew that the demoniac could be overcome through the assurance of reality, the image of which lies in the province of the indescribable yet nonetheless contains the unity of the world. For the images were taut with reality, since reality was always to be symbolized only by reality—, image upon image, reality upon reality, not one of them actually real as long as it stood alone, yet each a single symbol of an inviolate, ultimate truth which was the sum of their totality. And if in the many years past he had followed with increasing avidity and curiosity the decay and fragility which he felt at work upon his body, if for the sake of this amazing and amazed curiosity he had gladly taken on the discomfort of illness and pain, yes, if he had—and whatever a person did became more or less distinctly symbolic—continuously borne within him the desire, the seldom conscious but always impatient desire, for his bodily unity, which he constantly perceived to be but a seeming unity, to be finally dissolved, the quicker the better, so that the extraordinary might follow, so that dissolution might come to be redemption, might come to be a new unity, a consummation, and if this desire had accompanied and pursued him from his earliest youth, at least since that night in Cremona, possibly even since his childhood in Andes, either as a little childish game of anxiety or as an oppressive, memory-quelling fear, one as unrecallable now as the other, yet the question as to the meaning of such occurrences had never left him, it had been inherent in all of his nightly pre-listening, pre-searching, pre-sensing, and just as formerly he had lain upon his bed, a child in Andes, a boy in Cremona, knee pressed on knee, his spirit sunk into his pre-dreaming, his spirit like his body sunk into the ship of his being that extended over oceans and over the broad planes of earth, himself a mountain, a field, the earth, the ship, himself the ocean, listening into the night inside and outside, perhaps having always had the premonition that his hearkening was directed toward the achieving of that knowledge for which his whole life must be lived through, so now in the same fashion it happened again, it happened here and now, it happened today; and that which had once happened, having constantly become clearer and clearer to him, continued to happen again and again, was happening now; he did that which he had done his whole life long, but now he knew what it was, he knew the answer: he was listening to dying.

Could it be anything else? Man stands erect, he alone, yet he lays him down, stretched out quietly for sleep, for love, for death—, and it is also this threefold nature of his lying down that distinguishes him from all other creatures. Destined to grow upright as long as man stands erect, the human soul reaches out from the dark abyss where her roots are entwined in the humus of existence and strives upward even unto the sun-drenched dome of the stars, bearing upward her cloudy sources from the regions of Poseidon and Vulcan, bringing downward the clarity of her Apollonian goal, and the nearer she comes in this upward growth to being light-drenched form, the more shapely she becomes in her shadowing, branching out and unfolding like a tree, the more is she enabled to unify the darkness and the light in the shadowy leaves of her branches; but when she has stretched out, abandoned to sleep, to love, to death, when she herself has become an outstretched landscape, then her task is no longer the merging of opposites, for in sleeping, loving, dying, the soul is no longer either good or evil, she has become only an unbroken endless hearkening: spread out to infinity, infinitely held in the orbit of time, infinite in her repose, she is absolved from growth, and without growth, along with the landscape which is herself, she persists as the unchanged and unchangeable Saturnian realm throughout the whole of time, persisting from the golden age to the age of brass, aye, even beyond it to the return of the golden age, and by virtue of her nestling into the landscape, by virtue of her imprisonment in the realm of earth and earth’s meadows, on the surface of which the spheres of heavenly light and earthly darkness part one from the other, she is like them in being the border, separating and binding the regions above and below, belonging like Janus to both, to those of the wavering stars as well as to those of the weighty stones, to the etheric regions as well as to the fires of the underworld, januslike the double aspects of infinity, januslike the double aspects of the soul, as in her twilight she lies quietly outstretched to infinity so that her hearkening prescience may partake of the significance of both zones without uniting them; however, the circumstance as such has no meaning for her, is not worthy of pre-hearkening or prescience for she feels it neither as growth nor as fading nor as deterioration, neither as a blessing nor a burden, but more as a constant return of the all-encompassing Saturnian era in which the landscape of the soul and the earth are stretched out infinitely, inseparable in their respirations, inseparable in their seasons of sowing and blossoming, in their harvest or growth, in their dying and resurrection, in their boundless seasons, interwoven with the eternal return, surrounded by the circle of eternal sameness and consequently stretched out quietly for sleep, for love, for death—, a hearkening of the landscape and the soul, the Saturnian hearkening to deathless dying, golden and brazen together.

He was listening to dying; it could not be anything else. The knowledge of this had come over him without any shock, at most with the peculiar clarity which usually accompanies a mounting fever. And now, lying and listening in the darkness, he understood his life, and he understood how much of it had been a constant hearkening to the unfolding of death, life unfolded, consciousness unfolded, unfolded the seed of death which was implanted in every life from the beginning and determined it, giving it a twofold, threefold significance, each one developed from the other and unfolding through it, each the image of the other and its reality—was not this the dream-force of all images, particularly of those which gave direction to every life? was not something of the same sort hidden in the cave-images of the universal night which, miraculous and fear-inspiring with timelessness, heavy with stars and presaging eternity, domed death over all existence? What once in boyhood had been a childish and childlike conception of death, the conception of a grave into which the body would be lowered, had unfolded to the great image of the cave, and the erection of the mausoleum beside the Bay of Naples, there near the Posilipian grotto, was more than a mere repetition and visualization of the old childish concept; nay, the whole dome of death was symbolically expressed by this building, perhaps still a little childish when reduced to such earthly dimensions, nevertheless the symbol of the mighty all-embracing domain of death in which he, ever aware of the goal and yet seeking it, he a path-seeker in the dome of death, had day-dreamed a whole life away. For the sake of the all-embracing might of this goal he had long, yes too long, searched for his own vocation; for the sake of this always known yet never known goal, dissatisfied with every profession, he had prematurely broken away from each one, unable to find peace in any, either in the calling of a medical man, a mathematician, astrologer, philosophical scholar or teacher: the demanding but unrealized vision of knowledge, the grave recognizable image of death had stood perpetually before his eyes, and no vocation measured up to that, as none exists that is not exclusively subserviated to the knowledge of life, none with the exception of that one to which he had finally been driven and which is called poetry, the strangest of all human occupations, the only one dedicated to the knowledge of death. Only he who dwelt in the interrealm of farewell—oh, it lay behind him and there was no returning,—only he who tarried in the dusk on the banks of the stream, far from its source, far from its estuary, was in durance to death, serving death like the priest by virtue of his office which stood above any personal vocation, mediating between the above and the below, pledged to the service of death and through this likewise banished to the interrealm of farewell; yes, he had always deemed as priestly the task of the singer, perhaps because of the strange consecration to death inherent in the enraptured fervor of every work of art; until now he had seldom dared to admit it to himself, he had repudiated it, just as in his first poems he had not dared to approach death, but rather had been vigilant to ward off that which threatened and was always at hand by the lovely-loving power of an ardent love for life, more and more futile in his resistance since the poetic power of death had proven itself the stronger, acquiring step by step the privileges of domicile which, in the Aeneid, assumed full sovereign rights, following the will of the gods: the clattering, bloody, admonishing, unchanging sovereignty of fate, the all-conquering sovereignty of death, which by this token also conquers itself and annuls itself. For all simultaneousness was sunk in death, all simultaneity in life and in poetry was forever obliterated in death’s complete annulment, and death was filled by day and night, they penetrating each other and becoming the bi-colored cloud of dusk; oh, death was filled by all the diversities that had proceeded from unity so that finally through death these might achieve to unity, death was filled by the initial herd-wisdom of the beginning and by the isolating knowledge of the end—it was comprehension in a single moment of existence, in the very moment which was already that of non-existence; for death was involved in an unending reciprocity with the stream of life and the stream of life flowed incessantly into death, welcomed by death, turned back to the source, the lapse of time changed to the unity of remembrance, to the memory of worlds upon worlds, to the memory of the god: only he who accepted death was able to complete the orbit of mortality, only the eye of him who sought the eye of death would not fail when it gazed into nothingness, only he who hearkened to death had no need of flight, he might remain, because memory had become the well of simultaneousness, and he alone who plunged into memory could hear the harp-tone of that moment in which the terrestrial should open into the immense unknown, opened to rebirth, and to the resurrection of everlasting memory—, landscape of childhood, landscape of life, landscape of death, they were one in their indivisible simultaneousness, previsioning the landscape of the gods, the country of the very beginning and the very end, eternally joined by the span of the seven-colored, dewy-breathed bow, oh, the pastures of the fathers. Much took place for the sake of memory, divulging itself at last as a listening to death; and much that was taken for death was only memory, anxious yearning memory that had need to be guarded with care that it might never become lost. It had been so and not otherwise in the case of the tomb near the grotto of Posilipo, caressed by sea breezes, played upon by springlike shadows, entwined in green leaves, this almost playfully built homestead of death full of childhood memories, which he had incorporated into a gardenlike serenity without having been conscious of doing so, in consequence of which everything that had been taken in by the child’s eyes at the paternal house in Andes was to be found here on a smaller scale and only slightly altered; for example, the entrance drive to the gate of the courtyard was now the main path through the garden, equipped with the same double curve, bordered on the left by the same laurel bushes, leading on the right to the mound of his childhood games, even though this one was crowned by only a single cypress instead of the ancient olive-groves, while to the rear of the edifice, in great tranquility here as there, the elm trees, shrouded in a twittering of birds, arose today even as in times past, a shelter of solitude and peace; and just as in boyhood it had been possible to pass his hand over the wattled hedge, now it was possible with equal definiteness to dream back, just as definite and valid for all times as it had been to dream forward, to dream toward death and dying, the goal of all dreamy hearkening since the days of childhood, the goal and source of his memory, clear, unloseable, knowledge-seeking, although the image of the tomb was only a small, an extremely small fragment of memory set in the stream of the past, a quite palpable island, emerging almost by chance in its slight palpability, vanishing, and therefore deserving oblivion compared to the roaring width of the flood which poured itself into his constant hearkening; constantly the flood came toward him, memory-wide, wave-wide, constantly and softly and grandly it advanced, wave after wave of the once-beheld, gleaming in the harp-tone of enduring ineffability—oh, lovely imprisonment of youth, enfolded and ready for freedom—, and it was as if all brooks and ponds of yore poured themselves into this stream of memory, drizzling between the fragrant willows, drizzling between banks verdant with trembling reeds, lovely images without end, themselves a cluster picked by the hands of a child, a cluster of lilies, gilly-flowers, poppies, narcissus and buttercups, the image of childhood in a landscape revealed by wandering and wandering, by song after song, the image of the paternal pastures, the image he had been forced to seek wherever he had been driven, the image of the one and unforgettable landscape of his life, ineffable-inexpressible image, despite that it was so very luminous, so sharp of contour, sun-drenched, transparent, despite this unfailing clarity with which it had accompanied him, so inexpressible that however often he had depicted it it only resounded in the unutterable, always only there where language is insufficient, where it strikes beyond its own earthly-mortal boundaries and penetrates into the unutterable, abandoning an expression through words and—only singing itself into the structure of the verses—opening up between the very words a swooning, breathless, momentary abyss so that life could be comprehended and death be apprehended in these silent depths, which have become silent to disclose the completeness of the whole, the simultaneous stream of creation in which the eternal rests: oh, goal of poetry, oh, these moments in which speech sublimated itself beyond all description and all communication, oh, these moments in which it plunged into simultaneousness so that it could not be determined whether memory was gushing from speech or speech from memory, these were the moments in which the landscape of childhood had begun to blossom, leaving itself behind, growing beyond itself and every memory, beyond every beginning and every end, transmuted to a simple, rustic, shepherd’s order in some golden age, transmuted to the scene of the Latin emergence, transmuted to the reality of the on-marching, commanding and serving gods, not the primordial beginning, surely not the original order, surely not the initial reality but still a symbol of it, not, to be sure, to the voice which was expected to call out from the furthest unknown, out of the inexpressible and extraordinary, out of the unchangeably and utterly divine, but still a token of it, but surely the echo-like symbol of its being and almost an affirmation of it—, the symbol that was reality, reality that would become the symbol in the face of death.