Passion

Writing a 90-page paper has made me more careful with words, but I fear it has not taught me to have many fewer of them on my fingertips. I ache to speak of all the impressions, ideas, passions, and reasons, that have brushed my soul in these last few days. They are so many! Yet, because I have learned to be more careful with words, I shall pace myself. Only know that I expect to write very often this summer.

Is it really not yet a month since I put the final phrase to "Absolute Beauty"? How can that be? Yet I believe it. I have lived through ages since then. Whole generations of thought and feeling have risen up, fallen in love with one another, married, born children and grandchildren, and died, all in less time than it takes to tell.

My mind is porous. One moment I think of Shakespeare's childhood, because I am reading his biography. Next, I find myself pondering the texture of leather---now, a blink---my fancy is filled with summer lightning and thunderstorms. I cannot settle; I cannot be still. I am a whisper and a glance and a slight moment. Were I at school, I would go at once to the piano and play until my playing shook its teeth.

I want to talk to you of truth, of movement, of trust, of the vision of Prodesse that increasingly occupies my mind. I want to talk of small children and their enormous eyes. I want to summon fairies---I want to awaken the dawn!---and yet I ask no more than to walk all night, a long, long night, in the singing blue darkness of the summer evening.

I cannot be still. I cannot settle on anything. Don't you hear it? Things dead, long dead, see how they rise again! I recognize that passion---I thought it had long since left my heart. Passion. How long is it since I abandoned myself to any sort of passion? I think it is a lifetime.