July 19.

The stars are the dust rubbed off from human souls.  “Dust unto dust thou shalt return.”  At the last judgment, they will fly together in an angelic hosting, and clothe once more the souls which moved in them, and our souls will rule their songs.  Human suffering is the friction of angels making stars. ...  I know now that the end of one’s forty days is not complete knowledge, but only a clear indication of the road.  The joy is in that, and also the sorrow.  It is the direction given to the will, orders to be so carefully obeyed.  This is the greatest discovery of all.  Words do not reveal it.  It is absolutely prosaic, though it is eternal beauty.  But what I have written does not reflect it even faintly as it seems to me.  Read Hello this afternoon.  The freedom of the dunes this morning seemed to extend more than is usual.  Later I read from Plato’s “Symposium.”

July 20.

...  The proverbial symbol of impermanence is writing upon sand.  What could be more gloriously permanent?  To have one’s message spelled out by singing planets, to write upon the stars.  It is so that our songs have immortality.  “Verba scripta manent” takes on a majestic significance.  Are not joy and sadness the same?  The only difference is one of rapidity.  Sadness is made up of the long, slow, majestic chords of the song.  It seems to me that when a wheel seems to cease motion, and finally attains a state of motionlessness, it is perhaps merely turning into a terrible speed which we cannot perceive.  It is the turning of an hour-glass.  When I am dead, I wish only my faults to be chronicled, for these alone have any value for the world.  I have dreamt always of cycles of infinities.  As a decimal always tends by evolution towards a number, so also we evolve toward an infinity.  Yet at that goal another infinity starts, as another infinity starts in numbers,—­the symbol of patience after all.

     “Unto the man of yearning thought
     And aspiration, to do nought
     Is in itself almost an act,—­
     Being chasm-fire and cataract
     Of the soul’s utter depths unseal’d. 
     Yet woe to thee if once thou yield
     Unto the act of doing nought!”

Read Hello and Elia.  I am learning how to see in crowds.  These past few days I have succeeded in withdrawing into life for long periods in the midst of a general conversation, yet my absence was not noted in the least.  Out of it I hope will develop the ability to be with life always in the tangle and confusion of city circumstance.  This afternoon I read Phaedrus aloud on a sunny cliff, and in the evening read aloud Keats’ “I stood tiptoe” on the green heights in the wind and the rain.  Rossetti’s lines do not forbid a life of contemplation, but rather encourage it as distinguished from quietism. ...  Through the summer I am to see the Crucifixion.  How I envy St. Francis the Stigmata!  Even as a little boy I desired them—­but I shall never be able perhaps to love passionately enough.  The nights that I cried as a little fellow without knowing why, just because I loved, were nearer than I shall ever be again.