She stood before me like riches that were mine. Even then, in the dark, I was tortured, ravening, unfree, Ashamed, and shameful, and vicious. A man is so terrified of strong hunger; and this terror is the root of all cruelty. She loved me, and stood before me, looking to me. How could I look, when I was mad? I looked sideways, furtively, being mad with voracious desire. V THIS comes right at last. When a man is rich, he loses at last the hunger fear. I lost at last the fierceness that fears it will starve. I could put my face at last between her breasts and know that they were given for ever that I should never starve never perish; I had eaten of the bread that satisfies and my body's body was appeased, there was peace and richness, fulfilment. Let them praise desire who will, but only fulfilment will do, real fulfilment, nothing short. It is our ratification our heaven, as a matter of fact. Immortality, the heaven, is only a projection of this strange but actual fulfilment, here in the flesh. So, another hunger was supplied, and for this I have to thank one woman, not mankind, for mankind would have prevented me; but one woman, and these are my red-letter thanksgivings. VI To be, or not to be, is still the question. This ache for being is the ultimate hunger. And for myself, I can say "almost, almost, oh, very nearly." Yet something remains. Something shall not always remain. For the main already is fulfilment. What remains in me, is to be known even as I know. I know her now: or perhaps, I know my own limitation against her. Plunging as I have done, over, over the brink I have dropped at last headlong into nought, plunging upon sheer hard extinction; I have come, as it were, not to know, died, as it were; ceased from knowing; surpassed myself. What can I say more, except that I know what it is to surpass myself? It is a kind of death which is not death. It is going a little beyond the bounds. How can one speak, where there is a dumbness on one's mouth? I suppose, ultimately she is all beyond me, she is all not-me, ultimately. It is that that one comes to. A curious agony, and a relief, when I touch that which is not me in any sense, it wounds me to death with my own not-being; definite, inviolable limitation, and something beyond, quite beyond, if you understand what that means. It is the major part of being, this having surpassed oneself, this having touched the edge of the beyond, and perished, yet not perished. VII I WANT her though, to take the same from me. She touches me as if I were herself, her own. She has not realized yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other, she thinks we are all of one piece. It is painfully untrue. I want her to touch me at last, ah, on the root and quick of my darkness and perish on me, as I have perished on her.