_In setting down a record of my terrible adventure, I hope to escape (for brief and precious hours) from this eternal Twilight. I shall dwell once more in the innocent world of men: in the world where the sun is luminous because the night is black, where life seems good because death seems real. Let me not dwell upon the nature of this Twilight. It is neither darkness nor brightness, neither warmth nor cold. It is penetrant and it is hungry, and it devours the flesh of man that is made of sunnier senses. You who read do not know the blessed marriage of your world. You do not know that sun is sweet to you, because you are sun: that your five senses catching to your mind the rounded beauty of nature and of love bring but fond reflections ... stars, fair women, mountains ... of yourself._ _There is a Truth in which the sun burns up as swiftly as your flesh. All is gone here; and in this thundering silence the march of man that to you seems so bloody, to me has the cadence of a quiet song. Man is born into his mother’s arms, and belief cradles him. That breast and that milk are real, for they are part of himself. The day is real and the night, work and reward are real, love is real: pain is real because the need of victory is real. What blessedness! Man is complete in his flesh because no form, no thought comes to his mind that is not portion of his flesh. He loves his flesh in the sun and calls it God: he loves his flesh in a woman and calls it Love. He is all simple and whole: only his words, like in a child’s game, break his unitary world. But where I am, the flesh is not gone: it has become a fragment of a truth vastly beyond it. This is agony, and from this I seek respite._ _I want once more to see the sun as you do: to feel the earth solid and absolute beneath my purposeful feet. I want to live again in your commanding passions: loyalty, wonder, anger, worship, love. What joy to be able to say: “This is my friend,” “This is my work,” “This is my sweetheart,” “This is my faith.” What common joy for you! Is it not worth what you call pain to have it? Is it not worth what you call death to have life?_ _For me, pain and joy, love and hate, heaven and earth, life and time and death have dimmed. They are all words of mortal flesh, expressive of flesh’s elemental moods. Outside the flesh, they have no meaning. My flesh is broken up but it is not yet gone; so that its word and will still speak to me ... fragmentarily, nostalgic ... of its departed day. I tell my story to bring its wholeness back._ PART ONE THE MAN WITH THE WHITE HEAD _a_