Many years ago I saw, between sleeping and waking, a woman of incredible
beauty shooting an arrow into the sky, and from the moment when I made my
first guess at her meaning I have thought much of the difference between
the winding movement of nature and the straight line, which is called in
Balzac's _Seraphita_ the "Mark of Man," but comes closer to my meaning as
the mark of saint or sage. I think that we who are poets and artists, not
being permitted to shoot beyond the tangible, must go from desire to
weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision
comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the
brutes. I do not doubt those heaving circles, those winding arcs, whether
in one man's life or in that of an age, are mathematical, and that some in
the world, or beyond the world, have foreknown the event and pricked upon
the calendar the life-span of a Christ, a Buddha, a Napoleon: that every
movement, in feeling or in thought, prepares in the dark by its own
increasing clarity and confidence its own executioner. We seek reality
with the slow toil of our weakness and are smitten from the boundless and
the unforeseen. Only when we are saint or sage, and renounce Experience
itself, can we, in the language of the Christian Caballa, leave the sudden
lightning and the path of the serpent and become the bowman who aims his
arrow at the centre of the sun.