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.

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Then, where is God, where is God?
Why does He not intervene in this frightful, regular crisis?
Why does He not prevent, by a miracle, that fearful miracle by which one who is adored suddenly or gradually comes to be hated?
Why does he not preserve man from having to mourn the loss of all his dreams?
Why does he not preserve him from the distress of that sensuousness which flowers in his flesh and falls back on him again like spittle?
Perhaps because I am a man like the man in the room, like all other men, perhaps because what is bestial engrosses my attention now, I am utterly terrified by the invincible recoil of the flesh.
"It is everything in the world," he had said.

"It is nothing," he had also said, but later.

The echo of those two cries lingered in my ears.
Those two cries, not shouted but uttered in a low scarcely audible voice, who shall declare their grandeur and the distance between them?
Who shall say?
Above all, who shall know?
The man who can reply must be placed, as I am, above humanity, he must be both among and apart from human beings to see the smile turn into agony, the joy become satiety, and the union dissolve.