And as to that other world, do you know what instinct tells me it is?
That there we will have a hundred senses where we now have but five; and
there we shall see the Thought as well as the Thing: every thought,
every dream, every hope, every love, these we know not as words but as
beautiful beings whom we shall meet face to face. And its only law is
Balance, Compensation, Recompense, Poise; the Equation of the Universe.
We wonder here why there should be such things as sin and sorrow and
injustice. But there we shall know that sin is not sin, but the prism
which shows us goodness, that sorrow is not sorrow but the prism of
gladness, and that death, as we now know it, is not a stopping, but the
prism through which we see another light. Here, on our little earth,
with only our five small senses, we see only the prism. There we shall
see the rays. It is the difference between the star and its light.
And if we hold the prism of sorrow here, Dear Heart, as I do now, shall
I not hold a handful of the joys which stream through it there? For
here ’tis a poem written, but there the meaning of it. Here ’tis the
sun rising, there the dawn. Here the giving of alms, there the joy of
the giving. Here it is the instrument that makes music, there the
music. Here ’tis only a picture, there the soul that made it.
And if you be passed, Eloise, if you be passed, even yet will I keep
writing to you. For if letters be written with one’s heart’s blood, I
know, in my soul of souls, that our dead will read them. For though I
have lived but a little while according to the span of things, and less
according to the knowledge of things, yet the little span and the little
knowledge have made known to me the greatest of all truths: _that I do
not know_: that even with my little knowing I have seen things come to
pass which were more wonderful than those which I thought could ever be;
that we live on the borderland of a world wonderful, mysterious; that we
are clasping hands with eternity, and need only the language that will
yet come to spell out the touch for us. And so I shall write to you
even though you are dead, write to you, sweetheart, a love letter for
your heaven, knowing that not only will you read it, but that I, in the
writing, as in all giving, will at last be the one who will get.
It is selfishness in me at last, Eloise, selfishness that I may hold
through life and forever this love of you in my heart, now that it has
only memory and not your own sweet self to live on. And no greater love
and more constant can there be than that which lives on memory. For the
living-love, being flesh, must change with the years. But memory-love,
being eternal, can never change.
I am at Iloilo; and the gap is great since that long ago June, that June
of Tennessee blue grass and roses, and the old home and you, sweetheart.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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