I

Could I have known, that day I saw you first,   How much my fate lay coiled within your eyes!   How Nemesis spoke in your soft replies! Could I have known — and so have shunned the worst?  Could I have known how for my bitter thirst   Your coming brought but saltest tears and sighs,   How going life seemed fled with you likewise.  Could I have known — oh angel love-accurs’d!

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall, dissected, their bird-wings severed  like trophies. No one lives in this room without living through some kind of crisis. No one lives in this room without confronting the whiteness of the wall behind the poems, planks of books, photographs of dead heroines. Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

But how could Arthur go, clutching his tiny lily, with his eyes shut up so tight and the roads deep in snow?

HERMIONE: Where can I find a huge, blazing fire that I may jump into? Where can I find a huge cliff above the sea or on a high mountain above a forest? I want to hurl myself over it and die and go to meet the shadows in the world below. They would take care of me.

Be to her, Persephone, All the things I might not be; Take her head upon your knee. She that was so proud and wild, Flippant, arrogant, and free, She that had no need of me, Is a lonely little child Lost in Hell, - Persephone, Take her head upon your knee; Say to her, “My dear, my dear, It is not so dreadful here.”

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and blown the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think i too have known autumn too long.

It seems to me that I am crossing an endless solitude to go I don’t know where.

Time passes, as a cold wind sweeps the summer shapes away At the release of autumn, while the intervals between the years Become shorter, and the illusion of their real significance Becomes more and more attenuated, and finally disappears.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather Compelled my imagination many days, Many days and many hours: her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

I think of you, of the lake, of the city, of the burning days on the shore, in the sand, of the shadowy paths, of the musical breath of the air. The water is quiet, blue, I’d like to lie in a boat in the reeds, I don’t want to speak, everything around me will tell you what I’m sensing.

The sea wrinkled slowly against the ship’s sides.  The sky filled with stars.  And Mersault, in silence, felt in himself extreme and violent powers to love, to marvel at this life with its countenance of sunlight and tears, this life in its salt and hot stone - it seemed that by caressing this life, all his powers of love and despair would unite.  That was his poverty, that was his sole wealth.  As if by writing zero, he was starting over again, but with a consciousness of his powers and a lucid intoxication which urged him on in the face of his fate.      And then Algiers - the slow arrival in the morning, the dazzling cascade of the Kasbah above the sea, the hills and the sky, the bay’s outstretched arms, the houses among the trees and the smell, already upon him, of the docks.  Then Mersault realized that not once since Vienna had he thought of Zagreus as the man he had killed with his own hands.  He recognized in himself that power to forget which only children have, and geniuses, and the innocent.  Innocent, overwhelmed by joy, he understood at last that he was made for happiness.