He said: Has it never seemed to you, one day, when you see at the bend of the road a person coming toward you, that his familiar face hides another face for which you know no name?

In fleeting moments when the senses grow clear, the glittering veils behind which man conceals himself fall away, and his first truth appears before him: and behold, he is a collection of vices, most like a mass of serpents writhing one over the other.

I said to myself: If the curtains were drawn aside, if the cells of the body came undone — and how quickly they come undone — then woe to man for what he would see. The least he would say is: Cursed be that hour in which the women rejoiced around my mother, announcing the glad tidings of my birth. Flight? But whither?... A cry for help? But to whom?... Or can a man hide from his own self?... Narcissus and Cain! Illusion and truth: had Narcissus possessed the eye of Cain, he would have cast himself into the water.

Man has painted his body with potions only to cover his defect, and he invented games only to divert himself from his deadly reality. He who formed the son of Adam bestowed upon him nothing but shortness of sight.

I said: Man's pride is a mask with which he hides from himself the beauty of the world, and his tyranny is a fetter with which he binds his own soul and distorts its measures. Say: If man lifted from his eyes the film of selfishness — and how easily it may be lifted, for a single look of tenderness suffices — the world would appear to him beautiful, all of it.

Have you never felt, one day, when weariness was wrecking your nerves, and your eyes fell upon the eyes of a child absorbed

in his heavenly dream — have you not felt purity spreading around you, flooding you with its fragrance, pouring rest into your soul?

Would that man understood this lesson which innocence recites to him, and saw existence as it is, in its absolute truth: a homeland of the eternal love that fashioned it in its own image.

Terror? And why terror, when the world is a message of love?

He said: The son of Adam built place after his own likeness, deformed in its very atoms, and wove time as a passageway for his crimes toward nothingness. Is not history a register of vice, and its commentary a justification of it? I have contemplated the work of man and found nothing but sin, pointing its finger at its maker.

Here is a city — no sooner do your feet touch it than you imagine its walls oozing hatred; and another, faded, as though its meaning lay in meaninglessness; and a third over which the specter of selfishness holds sway. There is a street you pass through as though it were a grave; another whose windows seem to hide thieves lying in wait for the passersby; another stained with blood; and the one after it gnawed by worms. Listen to the voices of the crowds. Do they not resemble now the howling of wolves, now a throng of ravens, and now the wailing of the mourning women?

I said: Behind the events that follow one another through the days lies what the days cannot touch, and in the depths of history, what surpasses the knowledge of the historians. Have you not read in the books that He who created the world passed through it and saw that it was beautiful, all of it, and therefore chose it as a footstool for His feet; and then formed man free and

strong, to complete on the seventh day the work of the first?

Love has no skull, O man, that the senses might grasp it. And purity springs up only apart from all eyes, lest man make of it a commodity.

In the eyes of the child is what the learning of all the learned cannot reach, and in the modesty of the girl a riddle that has baffled the minds of the pretenders.

He said: How often you have told me of days when you would sit upon the summits of the Cedars, the mountain of the Lord, where you look out over the holy valley. Did it not seem to you, as you climbed the rock, that something like a choking gas was tracking your footsteps, rising with you, as though in its spreading it sought to engulf the worlds of the firmament?

Know, then, that this is nothing but the flame of evil pouring from the hearts of men as dark smoke, wishing it could return existence to the first nebula. Open your eyes, look closely: do you not see the face of the earth as a stage for worms in perpetual ferment, like a fit of rage against the serenity of the ether? Have you not read in the books: Cursed is the earth that you tread?

I said: In the heights, where the earth touches infinity, the soul is united with the life-giving Spirit that mantles existence and pierces it forever, to restore it to its pure essence.