*

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its paintings, I haven't read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.

(...) it was not until Sebastian, idly turning the page of Clive Bell's Art, read: '"Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?" Yes. I do,' that my eyes were opened.

Are our lives epiphany-centered; image-centered; wonderfully static; jewel-like; pristine, sacred in timelessness?—or are they vast contours—hills, hillocks, plains, declivities, mountains, trenches, ruts, meadows, woodland—to be traversed, in time, in motion, in plot.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

Traces of happier times, lived out in some avenue somewhere … / A nostalgic longing for the fountains that play in other people’s gardens …

The London winter deepened. It was bitterly cold all the time; and dark, the sun never there, round-the-clock glumness, dim to dark and back again. Yet this was my enthralled time, such as I had never had, such as would not recur. O halcyon winter, solstice of my days… a magic ring of hours, rounding itself within the undiscerning dark. I have stepped out of this charmed circle, gone on living, not wanting anything strongly. Should I be asked now what I wanted of life, I would say, ‘Happiness, I suppose,’ then add quickly: ‘But I’m quite happy, you know. A good husband, a child…’ If I were to tell the truth, that their existence, my family’s being in my proximity, remains vague to me as tombstones of strangers in a common cemetery, that only a certain winter exists for me, vivid and clear, surging with life, and that all else is neutral, formless, indifferent, people would think me queer. Only when my mind goes back to that London winter do I feel alive, instead of merely knowing as a fact that I live. In that closed memory do I count my heartbeats by the spirited blood’s surge, there once again I walk with Mara through the evening that is night, holding an electric torch in my hand, the blacked-out glass letting through a faint yellow ring at our feet, and I know what it is to love, to want to die for love.

If I were an actor captured on film or could record my speaking voice on disc I’m sure that I would still be a long way from knowing how I seem from outside because, whether I like it or not, record what I will of myself, I remain stuck here inside the high-walled garden of my consciousness of me.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

He saw rich towns in which men sat in comfort reading books with golden covers. Eyvind coveted the books, and not only for the gold. He understood that treasures also lay inside the covers, treasures that were hard to put a price on. While Eyvind never became a literate man, he saw as he went on that books contained words that could transform men into priests and kings and healers.

After I transferred, in my junior year, to the University of Wisconsin, I made in this far, new place a discovery for myself that has fed my life ever since. I express a little of my experience in a story, one fairly recent and not yet completed. It's the story of a middle-aged man who'd come from a farm in the Middle West, who's taciturn and unhappy as a teacher of linguistics and now has reached a critical point in his life. The scene is New Orleans; he and a woman are walking at night (they are really saying goodbye) and he speaks of himself without reserve to her for the first time. He'd put himself through the University of Wisconsin, he tells her: "And I happened to discover Yeats, reading through some of the stacks in the library. I read the early and then the later poems all in the same one afternoon, standing up, by the window... I read 'Sailing to Byzantium', standing up in the stacks, read it by the light of falling snow. It seemed to me that if I could stir, if I could move to take the next step, I could go out into the poem the way I could go out into that snow. That it would be falling on my shoulders. That it would pelt me on its way down-that I could move in it, live in it - that I could die in it, maybe. So after that I had to learn it," he said. "And I told myself that I would. That I accepted the invitation." The experience I describe in the story had indeed been my own, snow and all; the poem that smote me first was "The Song of Wandering Aengus"; it was the poem that turned up, fifteen years or so later, in my stories of The Golden Apples and runs all through that book. At length too, at Wisconsin, I learned the word for the nature of what I had come upon in reading Yeats. Mr. Riccardo Quintana lecturing to his class on Swift and Donne used it in its true meaning and import. The word is passion.