Finally, to master the world, one must learn actually to enjoy the mutation of material things, as one of an audience watches the movements on the stage. No longer torn here and there in the small fury of detached affairs, one laughs richly at the progress of the Play. Possessing the spirit of all things within, he realises that nothing he has can really be taken away. No longer identifying himself with material objects, he is at last in touch with the perfect and changeless archetypes. This dispassion, so difficult to reach, at last extends over all world-forms. One ceases to love bodies; one loves souls. The son at the front, the daughter taken to a different house, the empty seat at the table, crash of finance or romance--all but a passing of symbols--Godspeed and a smile. Bit by bit the valiant reaches that profound and almost divine indifference to the external, having bound himself to the real, the enduring, the inner cosmos. First passion, then dispassion, then compassion--conquest of pairs of opposites until night and day are seen as separate sides of the same globe. So with pain and pleasure and all fluctuations. Day by day, while learning this great secret, the aspirant is forced to die to the thing he loves most. Day by day the thing that he hates and fears most--for that he must live. At last, loves and hates merge together. One is no longer focalised upon a point, but upon a universe. He arrives at the great silence in himself, the static momentum. He no longer moves with the world--the passing show goes by. He transmutes pain into joy--not lying to the self, but because pain of the body is joy of the soul--joy of union, joy of birth that comes from pain. At last to be the Spectator! To possess the world, to realise the divinity of others, the ineffable equality of Souls. To have all,--the mothering winds of the hills and the holy breath of the sea; to move and laugh and die with all the world. 12 TOM AND THE LITTLE GIRL The younger boy with us--Tom, now seven, does not find it easy to express himself through writing. He draws well, but that is a talent which I would not recognise so quickly as the expression through words. I mean to send him away to an artist for a time. Tom's imagination is fertile and expansive. He dictates well--wonderful play of colours through his mind. He talked the following to an amanuensis, a year or more ago as he conned over a handful of coloured stones: