#grace frick

The sorcerer who pricks his thumb before he invokes the shades knows well that they will heed his call only because they can lap his own blood. He knows too, or ought to know, that the voices who speak to him are wiser and more worthy of attention than his own clamorous outcries.

What also reassures us is that sleep heals us of fatigue, but heals by the most radical of means in arranging that we cease temporarily to exist. There, as elsewhere to that blissful unconsciousness, and in accepting to be slightly less strong, less light, less heavy and less definite than our waking selves.

I grant that the most perfect repose is almost necessarily a complement to love, that profound rest which is reflected in two bodies.

This Letter