Elizabeth Costello полностью

He does not answer.

'Do you see many people like me, people in my situation?' she continues urgently, out of control now, hearing herself out of control, disliking herself for it. In my situation: what does that mean? What is her situation? The situation of someone who does not know her own mind?

She has a vision of the gate, the far side of the gate, the side she is denied. At the foot of the gate, blocking the way, lies stretched out a dog, an old dog, his lion-coloured hide scarred from innumerable manglings. His eyes are closed, he is resting, snoozing. Beyond him is nothing but a desert of sand and stone, to infinity. It is her first vision in a long while, and she does not trust it, does not trust in particular the anagram GOD-DOG. Too literary, she thinks again. A curse on literature!

The man behind the desk has evidently had enough of questions. He lays down his pen, folds his hands, regards her levelly. 'All the time,' he says. 'We see people like you all the time.'

At such moments even a negligible creature, a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart track winding over a hill, a mossy stone, counts more for me than a night of bliss with the most beautiful, most devoted mistress. These dumb and in some cases inanimate creatures press toward me with such fullness, such presence of love, that there is nothing in range of my rapturous eye that does not have life. It is as if everything, everything that exists, everything I can recall, everything my confused thinking touches on, means something.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal 'Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon' (1902)

Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon

Dear and esteemed Sir,

You will have received from my husband Philip a letter dated this 22nd August. Ask me not how, but a copy of that letter has come under my sight, and now I add my voice to his. I fear you may think my husband wrote in a fit of madness, a fit that by now may have passed. I write to say: It is not so. All that you read in his letter is true, save for one circumstance: no husband can succeed in concealing from a loving wife distress of mind so extreme. These many months have I known of my Philip's affliction, and suffered with him.

How did our sorrows come to be? There was a time, I remember, before this time of affliction, when he would gaze like one bewitched at paintings of sirens and dryads, craving to enter their naked, glistening bodies. But where in Wiltshire will we find a siren or a dryad for him to try? Perforce I became his dryad: it was I whom he entered when he sought to enter her, I who felt his tears on my shoulder when again he could not find her in me. But a little time and I will learn to be your dryad, speak your dryad speech, I whispered in the dark; but he was not consoled.

A time of affliction I call the present time; yet in the company of my Philip I too have moments when soul and body are one, when I am ready to burst out in the tongues of angels. My raptures I call these spells. They come to me -I write without blushing, this is no time for blushing – in my husband's arms. He alone is guide to me; with no other man would I know them. Soul and body he speaks to me, in a speaking without speech; into me, soul and body, he presses what are no longer words but flaming swords.