[15] 'La Morte' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_). [16] 'Le Roc' (_Ibid._). [17] 'Fleur Fatale' (_Les Débâcles_). [18] 'Le Roc' (_Les Flambeaux Noirs_). [19] 'Les Nombres' (_Ibid._). [20] 'Celui de la Fatigue' (_Les Apparus dans mes Chemins_). [21] 'La Joie' (_Les Visages de la Vie_). [22] _Ecce Homo!_ FLIGHT INTO THE WORLD On boit sa soif, on mange sa faim.--É.V., 'L'Amour.' In this crisis the negation was driven to the last possible limits. The sick man had denied not only the outer world, but himself as well. Nothing had remained but vexation, disgust, and torment. La vie en lui ne se prouvait Que par l'horreur qu'il en avait.[1] He had arrived at the last possibility, at that possibility which means destruction or transformation. The at first purely physical pain of the supersensitive organs of the senses had become a moral depression; the depression had become psychic suffering; and this again had gradually turned in a grandiose progression not only to pain in the individual thing but to suffering in the all: to _cosmic pain_. For Him, however, who in His loneliness took the suffering of the whole world upon His shoulders, who was strong enough to bear it for all the centuries, humanity has invented the symbol of 'God.' He who is born of earth and lives to die must perforce break down under so gigantic a burden. Into the last corner of his ego revengeful life had here driven the man who denied it, had driven him to the point where now he stood shivering before the abyss in his own breast, face to face with death and madness. The physical and poetic organism of Verhaeren was overheated to the most dangerous and extreme degree. This fever-heat--that of a flagellant --had brought his blood to the boiling-point; it was filling the chamber of his breast with pictures of such overwhelming horror that the explosion of self-destruction could only be prevented by opening the valve.