S̶e̶a̶n̶’s Reviews > Escapade > Status Update

Evening. On the virginal mountain there is a glow like the blooming of heavenly hyacinth in a dark, dark field. My own warmth goes out of me with the light. I am as cold as the shadows, I am chill denial, chaos again, the unnamed thing.

Realizing that, of necessity, an ill person is unsexed, I try to wring a cold mental harmony out of life, but, instead I find myself sucked inward, my intellect smothered as by a voluptuous and nauseating rhythm. What I most long for is to be able not to desire anything, for I think of all life as gradually and eternally becoming nothing.

I realize now that deep down in everyone is an instinct of being, unaffected by the values which consciousness imposes. This being is impersonal, undefined, a mere gesture which asserts life and takes no account of obligation or consequence. I want to be saved from myself, from the terrible self from which all my secondary life proceeds, the self which goes with closed eyes toward its own end.

I feel sometimes as if Death were holding me softly in a feathered palm, feeding me with the white blood of sorrow. And I think of a lost bird flying toward a gray horizon it will never reach, above the broken mirrors of marshes and the gray fur of reeds, endless!

The heat was the visible expression of a terrible silence, a silence in which the cracked voices of the old women were as irrelevant as the discordant notes of far-off birds. A stasis of life had created a vortex of intensity, a stillness into which life poured itself with the vividness of death.