The Forgotten Threshold | Page 2

Walking I found
my way out on the long gray dunes.
July 6.
On the dunes today with my mother. My hand swept idly over the soft
white sand, shifting the order of many thousands of starry worlds. What
a chord of music if one could but hear it in its entirety! As it was, I
caught wonderful echoes that would light the beauties of many a
sunrise. The silent man reminds me of Synge in his drifting life and the
fires glowing in his eyes. Today I saw the-beauty of a flower. ... Some
day I shall write a play about the stars. The action will burn in their
seedtime and blow on the winds of Fate with all its ironies. ... Tonight
in the sitting room I heard in my heart the singing of the sands. It is on
the shifting desert, I feel, that we shall discover the secret origin of
language. How the infinitely aspiring music must sound tonight along
the dunes!

July 7.
The night before last after I retired I felt that lifted feeling physically
which represents the beating of the tides. Last night it coalesced with
the singing of the sands. At Mass this morning the voices at the Credo
thundered out Et Homo factus est in a torrent of living sound. At the
elevation I saw a thin white flame rise from the uplifted chalice and
disappear. It takes a beam of light one hundred and eight years to travel
from Arcturus to the earth. Are we similar traveling beams, and is death
merely our arrival on another planet which we illumine? Today I read
aloud on the cliffs from the glories of Plato's Phaedrus.
July 8.
In the morning I wandered onto the dunes leading out toward Wonder
Island, but was driven off by the terns who were nesting. ... The billows
of the wind today mingled in me with the sands and the tide, so that I
experienced from a new angle Landor's "We are what suns and winds
and waters make us." ...
July 9.
My life will see much traveling.
July 10.
Morning on the dunes. A cold clear bath while mists drove over the
sands. Returning home, as I came to the deep sand on the road, I
perceived the mystery of the resurrection of the body. In death there is
no physical decay. The singing planets of the human body merely part
to combine in other songs, recurring again in the end to their old
disposal and song, exchanging other worlds for their own once more,
and recurring to the first motif of the symphony. I was sad this
afternoon for the will failed me in my work. Sitting on the sand this
morning the singing dunes had attained to the harmony of silence. All
at once a little wisp of seaweed--hardly more than a thread--started to
beat time upon the sands. And then I knew and saw it to be in its happy
beating the pulse that governed the music of the stars. Can the heart

conduct the symphony of the body? Tonight the sun set, borne away--a
Grail--by angels from the questing Galahad. There was a great silence
in my heart as I sat in the crowded room.
July 11.
A day of northeast wind and upward thunder. The joy of the wind was
in me, and I lost the sense of space. The air was so buoyant that it was
closely kin to the sea. ... Today I succeeded a little better with my will.
I had a strange sensation this afternoon, which told me that bare lonely
places are the only places to write drama, since there only can we find
the pure dynamic forces of life disentangled from the subtle and
complicated web of human ambitions and interests. The air was very
thin and clear at twilight, but the sun was hidden in the clouds. ...
July 12.
... There was a great silence this evening in the crowded room. Closing
my eyes, I raised the upper lids as far as possible without seeing
material things, and so saw myself in fearful wonder elevating the host
and chalice on high. I know now the inner meaning of "Domine, non
sum dignus ut intres sub tecta mea." Under these two arched roofs of
the eyes hidden from all light save Light, there is a secret dwelling. ...
A day of close-shrouded palling fog--a chrism confirming the strength
of beauty.
July 13.
This morning the wind blew through the fields of grass like countless
angels in the courts of heaven. Shadow and color and light and
movement dancing before the first syllable of the Name. A gull flew
down almost to my hand, and the sunlight thundered in my ears. Last
night the sea was