She glanced at me again, with her wonderful, unchanging eyes, that were
like the visible heavens, unthinking, or like two flowers that are open
in pure clear unconsciousness. To her I was a piece of the environment.
That was all. Her world was clear and absolute, without consciousness of
self. She was not self-conscious, because she was not aware that there
was anything in the universe except _her_ universe. In her universe I
was a stranger, a foreign _signore_. That I had a world of my own, other
than her own, was not conceived by her. She did not care.

So we conceive the stars. We are told that they are other worlds. But
the stars are the clustered and single gleaming lights in the night-sky
of our world. When I come home at night, there are the stars. When I
cease to exist as the microcosm, when I begin to think of the cosmos,
then the stars are other worlds. Then the macrocosm absorbs me. But the
macrocosm is not me. It is something which I, the microcosm, am not.

So that there is something which is unknown to me and which nevertheless
exists. I am finite, and my understanding has limits. The universe is
bigger than I shall ever see, in mind or spirit. There is that which
is not me.

If I say 'The planet Mars is inhabited,' I do not know what I mean by
'inhabited', with reference to the planet Mars. I can only mean that
that world is not my world. I can only know there is that which is not
me. I am the microcosm, but the macrocosm is that also which I am not.

The old woman on the terrace in the sun did not know this. She was
herself the core and centre to the world, the sun, and the single
firmament. She knew that I was an inhabitant of lands which she had