He said nothing for a long time. She thought that he might reply with questions: whether they had indeed loved; whether their life together would have remained perfect; whether, indeed, there had not been already a hesitation on her part. Then he spoke: “The supreme experience of the senses is the renunciation of love.” This did not seem to her an answer. She still waited, and soon he spoke again, looking steadily out through the doorway into the space of moonlight. His face was frozen and pure. “Do you still trouble my peace?” “I grieve for our beautiful ruined love. I cannot, cannot forget it.” His tones fell now with strange modulations, and there came to her cadences of the flute he played to her in the forest. “The shadow of the pine-branch travels across the floor, reaches my foot, passes over my body, but does not enter me. It is thus with the memory of love. It is thus also with the memory of the world. Around me, when I was a boy, I saw a world of rock and grass and blue sky. Then, when I had meditated on these, and perceived the secret life of water-meadow, torrent and flower, the seen world dissolved. Rock and grass became vaporous like the sky. I saw trees like apparitions, landscapes of shifting smoke, mountains of mist beyond mountains of mist melting endlessly away into an infinite horizon of æther. The world became a contemplation in the smoke of incense. It has gone, and now I meditate on what has taken its place. I am possessed of what is greater than joy. I have come into the calm of nothingness, into the lightless and ineffable regions of non-being, where there is neither splendour nor darkness. It is an ecstasy. There is no ripple from the created world; no tremor of the pain or passion of men; nothing that appertains to the mind of men; nothing in terms of thought and feeling, of aspiration or regret. The pure lily is no more than the filthy fungus; the loftiness of mountains and depth of waters are as the flatness and mud of the river-bed. I believe in the unnameable, without shape or substance, infinite and inexpressible; one in man, plant and inanimate matter; spirit of spirit, origin of origin, form of form. I believe in the way that cannot be followed, the truth that cannot be taught, the life which is more than life. It does nothing, yet there is nothing which it does not achieve; creates all things, yet in itself is not; all worlds and systems of worlds are born in it, yet it cannot be seen or heard; in its nothingness life and death and all modes of conceivable being reside; it does not exist, yet it is home to the soul of man. It is ineffable. I therefore renounce the world. I renounce joy and pain; the vision of spring and the solemn reaping of autumn; the delight in mountain and tree, in cloudscape, in the fierce tiger, in the flight of wild geese. I renounce the pride of life and the pleasure of the body, and I renounce for ever the memory and taste of love.”