PARTISAN REVIEW
dreadful act of violence against himself, which I could not contrive to
understand. I told him of my bewilderment. But his explication, I must
admit, did not satisfy me at all-or else I did not fully understand it.
"True," he said, "I yielded to an impulse of rage-one which could
only be directed against myself; against whom else could I have turned?
In face of the immeasurable horror of the accusations I had just dis–
covered, I felt an overwhelming desire to make a protest. And besides,
what I wanted to destroy was not so much my eyes themselves as the
canvas they held before me; the scenery before which I was struggling,
the falsehood in which I no longer believed; and this so as to break
through to reality.
"And yet, no! I was not really thinking of anything very clearly;
I acted rather by instinct. I put out my eyes to punish them for having
failed to see the evidence which had, as people say, been staring me
in
the face. But to speak the truth ... ah! how can I put it to you? ... No–
body understood me when I suddenly cried out '0 darkness, my light!'
And you also, you don't understand it-I feel that distinctly. People
heard it as a cry of grief; it was a statement of fact.
It
meant that in my
darkness I had found a source of supernatural light, illumining the
world of the spirit. It meant : 'Darkness, thou art henceforth my light.'
And at the moment when the blue of the sky went black before me, my
inward firmament became bright with stars."
He was silent, and for some moments remained deep in meditation.
Then he went on:
"As a young man, I passed for one who could see the future. I
believed it myself, too. Was I not the first, the only man to solve the rid–
dle of the Sphinx? Only since my eyes of flesh were torn with my own
hand from the world of appearances have I begun, as it seems to me,
to see reality. Yes: at the moment when the outer world was hidden
for ever from the eyes of my body, a kind of new eyesight opened out,
within myself, upon the infinite perspectives of an inner world, which
the world of appearances (the only one which had existed for me until
that time ) had led me to disdain. And this imperceptible world (in–
accessible, I mean, to our senses) is, as I now know, the only true one.
All the rest is an illusion, a deception moreover, which disturbs our
contemplation of what is Divine. Tiresias the blind sage once said to
me 'Who wishes to see God must first cease to see the world.' And I
didn't understand him then; just as you, yourself, 0 Theseus, do not
understand me now."
"I shall not attempt to deny," I replied, "the importance of this
world beyond temporal things of which your blindness has made you
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