He was
seeing, around the cells, the shadowy force lines of the organ, around
the organ the luminous mist of the organism. He passed calmly from one
great landscape to another.
Rome. To-day and yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow. The
"to-morrow" put in the life, guaranteeing an endless present, endless
breathing. He saw Rome the giant, the stone and earth of her, the vast
animal life of her, the vast passional, the mental clutch and
hammer-blow. The spiritual Rome? He sought it--it must be there. At
last, among the far arches, it rose, a light, a leaven, an ether....
Rome.
If there were boundaries in this ocean of air they were gauze-thin and
floating. He looked here and there, into landscapes Rome led to. Like
and like, and synthesis of syntheses! Images, finding that of which
they were images, lost their grotesqueness or meaninglessness of line,
their quality of caricature, lost unripeness, lost the dull annoy of
riddles never meant to be answered.... He had a great fund of images,
material so full that it must begin to build higher. Building higher
meant arrival in a fluid world where all aggregates were penetrable.
He lay still among the grasses, and it was as though he lay also amid
the wide, simple, first growths of a larger, more potent living. Now
and again, through years, he had been aware of approaches, always
momentary, to this condition, to a country that lay behind time and
space, cause and effect, as he ordinarily knew them.
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