THE ANGEL
"Who
is
this, then, that loves himself so much he is in torment?"
he said.
"I understand
all
things, and yet I see that I can suffer. This
face is surely my face, these tears my tears.... And yet, am I not
that power of transparence in whom this face, these tears, and their
cause, and whatever might dissipate that cause, are only imperceptible
motes of duration?"
*
* *
But it was of no avail that these thoughts arose and spread
throughout the fullneus of the sphere of thought, that similitudes
responded to each other, that contrasts declared themselves and were
resolved, and that the miracle of clarity was accomplished over and
over, and all Ideas sparkled in the light of each idea, like the jewels
they are in the crown of unitive knowledge; still nothing like a wrong
appeared in his faultless sight, nothing to explain the distress on his
face and the te.ars he saw through his tears.
* * *
"My pure part,"
he said,
"the Intelligence that with no effort
consumes all created things, without in turn being affected or altered
by any of them, cannot recognize itself
in
this face wet with weeping,
in these eyes whose light, of which they are composed, is somehow
damped by the humid imminence of tears.
"And how can it be that this fine weeping creature who is in
me, and of me, can suffer so? For after all, I see all that he is, myself
being knowledge of all things, and one can suffer only from some–
thing one does not know.
"0 astonishing Head,"
he said,
"charming, sorrowful Head, it
is true, then, that there is something else than light?"
* * *
And he questioned himself in the universe of his spiritual sub–
stance marvelously pure, where all I deas were living, equidistant
from each other and from himself, and in such perfection of harmony
and promptitude of responses that one could almost believe he might
himself vanish, and yet the system of their simultaneous necessity,
sparkling like a diadem, subsists by itself alone in its sublime plenitude.
*
*
*
And for an eternity he did not cease to know and not to un–
derstand.
(Translated by Jackson Matthews)
1191
