shadow-creatures ventured out of their cold, obscure element, they went
backwards and forwards in their wintry garden, thinking nobody could
see them.
Across, above them, was the faint, rousing dazzle of snow. They never
looked up. But the dazzle of snow began to glow as they walked, the
wonderful, faint, ethereal flush of the long range of snow in the
heavens, at evening, began to kindle. Another world was coming to pass,
the cold, rare night. It was dawning in exquisite, icy rose upon the
long mountain-summit opposite. The monks walked backwards and forwards,
talking, in the first undershadow.
And I noticed that up above the snow, frail in the bluish sky, a frail
moon had put forth, like a thin, scalloped film of ice floated out on
the slow current of the coming night. And a bell sounded.
And still the monks were pacing backwards and forwards, backwards and
forwards, with a strange, neutral regularity.
The shadows were coming across everything, because of the mountains in
the west. Already the olive wood where I sat was extinguished. This was
the world of the monks, the rim of pallor between night and day. Here
they paced, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, in the
neutral, shadowless light of shadow.
Neither the flare of day nor the completeness of night reached them,
they paced the narrow path of the twilight, treading in the neutrality
of the law. Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them, only the
law, the abstraction of the average. The infinite is positive and
negative. But the average is only neutral. And the monks trod backward
and forward down the line of neutrality.
Meanwhile, on the length of mountain-ridge, the snow grew
rosy-incandescent, like heaven breaking into blossom. After all, eternal
not-being and eternal being are the same. In the rosy snow that shone in
heaven over a darkened earth was the ecstasy of consummation. Night and
day are one, light and dark are one, both the same in the origin and in
the issue, both the same in the moment, of ecstasy, light fused in
darkness and darkness fused in light, as in the rosy snow above
the twilight.
But in the monks it was not ecstasy, in them it was neutrality, the
under earth. Transcendent, above the shadowed, twilit earth was the rosy
snow of ecstasy. But spreading far over us, down below, was the
neutrality of the twilight, of the monks. The flesh neutralizing the
spirit, the spirit neutralizing the flesh, the law of the average
asserted, this was the monks as they paced backward and forward.
The moon climbed higher, away from the snowy, fading ridge, she became
gradually herself. Between the roots of the olive tree was a rosy-tipped
daisy just going to sleep. I gathered it and put it among the frail,
moony little bunch of primroses, so that its sleep should warm the rest.
Also I put in some little periwinkles, that were very blue, reminding me
of the eyes of the old woman.
The day was gone, the twilight was gone, and the snow was invisible as I
came down to the side of the lake. Only the moon, white and shining, was
in the sky, like a woman glorying in her own loveliness as she loiters
superbly to the gaze of all the world, looking sometimes through the
fringe of dark olive leaves, sometimes looking at her own superb,
quivering body, wholly naked in the water of the lake.
My little old woman was gone. She, all day-sunshine, would have none of
the moon. Always she must live like a bird, looking down on all the
world at once, so that it lay all subsidiary to herself, herself the
wakeful consciousness hovering over the world like a hawk, like a sleep
of wakefulness. And, like a bird, she went to sleep as the shadows came.
She did not know the yielding up of the senses and the possession of the
unknown, through the senses, which happens under a superb moon. The
all-glorious sun knows none of these yieldings up. He takes his way. And
the daisies at once go to sleep. And the soul of the old spinning-woman
also closed up at sunset, the rest was a sleep, a cessation.
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