Some fatal signal of my will has challenged Truth to let me glimpse it, to let me _use_ it: and we are joined forever. If I am to live, I must destroy this sin of using Truth for my own life: I must make my life into a facet of the Truth. Men have done that. (But far more men have died.) Oh, let me make my human life this glory! In its shallow close, the air will gleam with a transcendent fire: all these broken surfaces of being which men call bodies, things, will throb with the divinity of wholeness. The common deed of spheres beyond man’s flat domain is Miracle. And it must enter now into my life. Or else I must pass out. * * * * * I lie upon my couch and am lifted to the topmost peak of a mountain solitude. In vaporous essence, all the events of my mind and of my heart rise from their recondite valleys and are a cloud about me. Solitude: at last I see your eyes. Deep and inscrutable and without color they look at me and draw my marrow. Solitude, you are terrible because you are so full of my own being. No other thing is there to impede this flow of all my thoughts and all my passions into your ghoulish void. Solitude, you are a horror because you are my self. And this ... my self ... the air that I must breathe: and this ... my self ... the flesh that I must eat. Why has this been my fate? Have I not loved my mother and my father? How differed my childhood from another’s? Turmoil there is always, moments of pain, flashes of anger, little understreams of injury and resentment. I was ambitious. Even as a child, I felt that I must prevail upon the world. And I was scarce a boy, when I knew my instrument, and moved forth to fashion it; knowing that I must create it, ere I could wield it. _To prevail by the truth._ Was that a sin? Who taught that that was sin? You are at fault, if that is sin ... all you masters! You Greeks and Hebrews, you noblemen of the mind whose past words are the body of our world. Why did you mislead me, if it is sin for a young boy to say: “I will to live to learn, as a man may, the truth.” ... But perhaps you also, even as now I ... found at the end of your passage, Hell. Perhaps too late. Perhaps the gate of agony had clamped you in, before you could send back to us a warning. The world that I have lost was sweet. Fondly I believed in it, devoutly I was attached to my belief. The world is not well lost. But it is lost indeed. How can I doubt that? I have slain and buried more than my father and my mother. My friends, how can I meet them? And my work: and the glow that came from work with colleagues and with masters and that was great part of my delight in work! And all my hopes ... the memory of comrades and of loves that was so good a promise of loves I might yet win....