So there she was. Her face for an instant as if eternal, her flesh devoutly mortal. There she was, then, her innocent eyes peering inside her own degradation. And in the meantime it would be useless to try to deter what was happening around her. And inside her it would be useless to try to awaken the understanding of her body living in that lengthily tense afternoon. She would never manage to repeat what she was thinking and what she was feeling was happening to her evanescently, light and shiny, so immaterial and fleeting that she couldn’t stop on any thought. Surprised, intimidated by her own ignorance beside an immobile certainty, she was dangling for an instant, interrupting the movement of her life and looking at herself in the mirror: that shape expressing some thing without laughter but anguishingly mute and so inside itself that its meaning could never be grasped. Looking at herself she wouldn’t be able to understand, only agree. She was agreeing with that deep body in shadows, with her silent smile, life as if being born from that confusion. Now her permission for herself was seeming even more ardent as if she were allowing her own future too. And she . . . but yes, yes, she was seeing the future . . . yes, in a glance made of seeing and hearing, in a pure instant the whole future . . . Though she only knew that she was seeing and not what she was seeing, just as all she could say about blue was: I saw blue, and nothing more . . . With her eyebrows raised she was awaiting the timid annunciation. What had existed in her life was an indistinct and infinite power, really infinite and pallid. But she could never have demonstrated the existence of that power as it would be difficult to prove that she felt like going on, that the color of the rose was pleasing to her, that she was feeling strength, that she was connected to the stone in the garden. What had existed in her life, untouched and never lived, had raised her through the world like the bubble that rises. But just after accomplishing some act — having one day looked one more time at the sky? having watched the man who was walking? having entered the Society of Shadows? or after a simple quiet instant? — after accomplishing some act impossible to refrain from, something fatal and mysterious, suddenly she could only henceforward this or that and her power had ceased . . . Henceforward she could manage to name whatever she could do and that capacity instead of assuring her of greater power was guaranteeing her in some inexplicable way a fall and a loss. Previously her most secure movement of life had been disinterested, she’d notice things she’d never use, a leaf falling would intercept the path she had started out on, the wind would undo her thoughts forever. After the Society of Shadows however she’d steal from each gaze its value for herself and beautiful would be whatever her body thirsted and hungered for; she had taken a side. She’d also observed Daniel lately. And without awareness she was seeing that her lightest matter had been corrupted slowly, that in him the sweet suffering in which both of them were living had been annihilated; in his being something had become more serious and inflexible, a trembling brutality. Or was she seeing him for the first time? She herself, though she wouldn’t deny or confirm, her eyes would automatically rise or lower before certain images and even if she strove never to choose, bemused she had already chosen. And now when she was hesitating in the dismay without pain she was aware that if later she resuscitated for joy and opened her heart in order to breathe again laughing, she was aware: lapsing and standing back up was irrepressible. The danger had ceased forever. Suddenly the words from which she lived in childhood seemed to have run out and she couldn’t find any others. She set out with care. She was experiencing a worried feeling of regret for living that moment, for being almost a young woman and for being the one to whom the instant was happening — she was seeming to feel that from a deep untouchable freedom she could garner strength in order to not allow herself. She was looking at the silent and pale air of the room, an instant immobile and without destiny. How fatal it was to have lived. For the first time she had aged. For the first time she was aware of a time behind her and the restless notion of something she could never touch, of some thing that no longer belonged to her because it was complete but that she still clung to because of her incapacity to create another life and a new time. Her entire childhood had been wrinkled by the cold air that was hurting inside her nose with icy ardor; she was seeing herself as if from far away, small, the dark shape in the fog already gilded by the sun, cast down looking on the ground at something she could no longer name; now her own breath was seeming to surround her with a tepid atmosphere, her eyes were opening in wide color, her body was straightening into a human creature. With a sigh of impatience and fear her body rebelled as if possessed and again froze in the bedroom. Having experienced the sweetness of fascination with and ardent obedience to Daniel, her malleable and weak nature was now longing to hand itself over to the force of another destiny. She was feeling that the harmony between her existence and the Farm where she had been born and was living had ceased; for the first time she was thinking about the journey to the city with a nervous pleasure full of hope and confused rage. Upper Marsh, the fog in
