it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the
moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing
with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made
incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no
truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to
be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the
appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow
have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there
is pain.

More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary
reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic
relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single
wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in
symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is
suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to
live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that
we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not
merely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years
to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be
starving the soul.--_De Profundis_.




VITA NUOVA


Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so
wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day.