What rubbish to talk about the stars. Vast suns, at immense distances, and beyond them, more. What then? If you imagine yourself at any point in space or wafting freely about from star to star you are not changed. Like enlarging the circle of your acquaintance. And finding it, in the end, the same circle, yourself. A difference in degree is also a difference in kind. Yes. But the _same_ difference. Relations remain the same however much things are changed. Interest in the stars is like interest in your neighbours before you get to know them. A way of running away from yourself. What is there to do? How know what is anyone's best welfare? To be alive, and to know it, makes a selfless life impossible. Any kind of life accompanied by that stupendous knowledge, is selfish. Christ? But all the time he was alone with a certainty. Today thou shalt be with me.... He was booked for Paradise from the beginning ... like the man in No. 5 John Street going to live in a slum, imagining he was experiencing a slum, with the latchkey of his west-end house in his pocket.... Now if he had sacrificed Paradise. But he couldn't. Then where was selflessness? Yet if Christ had never been, the sky would look different. A Grecian or a Jewish sky. Awful. If the personal delight that the sky showed to be nothing were put away? Nothing held on to but the endless pouring down of time? Till an answer came.... Get up tomorrow showing indifference to everything, refusing to be bewitched. There _is_ an answer or there would be no question. Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment. Tomorrow, certainly, gloriously, the daytime scenes, undeserved, uncontributed to, would go forward again in the sunlight. Forgetfulness would come of itself. Even the thought of the bright scenes, the scenes that did not matter and were nothing, spread over the sky the sense of the dawn it would be obliged to bring; ... the permitted postponement of the problems set by night. Dawn stole into the heart. With a sudden answer. That had no words. An answer that lost itself again in the day. But there would be no dawn; only the pitiless beginning of a day spoiled by the fever of a sleepless night. Torment, for nothing. The sky gazed down mocking at fruitless folly. She turned away. She must, would, sleep. But her eyes were full of the down-bent stars. Condemnation, and the communication that would not speak; stopping short, poised, probing for a memory that was there.... A harsh hissing sigh, far away; gone. The unconscious sea. Coming back. Bringing the morning tide. The sound would increase. The sky would thicken and come near, fill up with increasing blind light, ignoring unanswered pain. "You can put tea in the bedrooms." Alma, folded in her dressing-gown, disappearing into the house. The tumbled empty bed on the lawn, white in the open stare of the morning....