4.

It isn’t a warm smile. It is a smile of fire, a little piece of a great circle of silken steel lit for a moment by an inexplicable flash. If it is a smile that belongs to a person she is the mother of fates. It is a necessary smile, a thrilling glimmer of the way Gods might think, thoughts in which it is not possible for us to exist, never-ending thoughts without beginning, thoughts that permit no possibility, yet whose exactitude obliterates every apparently natural limit, every idiotic restriction everts to delight in the agonic responsibility permitted to each creative restraint. I just mean to say that my faith isn’t merely a form of scepticism, it isn’t a simple optimism based on a knowing ignorance, the we shall see of suspended finality: it is an End.

It is an End, it is Final, because it is in Touch with Something & not because it is Over, & this at least in part because it can never be done. But let’s not lean too hard on the impossible: it can be Not Done. In a similar sense to my declining to partake of your soup: I do not intend to refuse your hospitality but I must honour my own inhospitable soul: offending you is nothing compared to the unwelcome I can give myself, to be cast out of the pact of this deepest form of contact is a fate worse than death.

So many ways to end in endlessness: each of them total but none of them final. So many ways to miss the Absolute, to yearn for what does not move, which is the root of every feeling. Every feeling, in the end which is its beginning, is Peace. All true feelings are quiet. Quiet like the music music can’t not be.

Anything else is on the run.