The Forgotten Threshold | Page 2

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 sadly purifying the earth. I now understand the Washer of the Ford. Majesty lies in darkness, and grief is only the privilege of seeing Majesty. Today on the porch with closed eyes