THE dependence not only of the literary character and workmanship of a
writer, but even his innermost psyche, upon vision, normal or abnormal,
is a truth which has been dimly and falteringly felt by several writers.
Concerning "Madame Bovary," and his friend Flaubert, Maxime du Camp
reflects some glintings of the truth. But these and others, lacking the
requisite expert definiteness of knowledge, have failed to catch the
satisfying and clear point of view. To illustrate I may quote the
paragraph of du Camp:
"The literary procedure of Flaubert threw everybody off the track and
even some of the experts. But it was a very simple matter; it was by the
accumulation and the superposition of details that he arrived at power.
It is the physiologic method, the method of the myopes who look at
things one after the other, very exactly, and then describe them
successively. The literature of imagination may be divided into two
distinct schools, that of the myopes and that of the hyperopes. The
myopes see minutely, study every line, finding each detail of importance
because everything appears to them in isolation; about them is a sort of
cloud in which is detached the object in exaggerated proportions. They
have, as it were, a microscope in their eye which enlarges everything.
The description of Venice from the Campanile of St. Mark, that of
Destitution in 'Captain Fracasse,' by Gautier are the capital results of
myopic vision. The hyperopes, on the other hand, look at the _ensemble_,
in which the details are lost, and form a kind of general harmony. The
detail loses all significance, except perhaps they seek to bring it into
relief as a work of art.... Besides, the myopes seek to portray
sensations, while the hyperopes especially aim at analysis of the
sentiments. If a hyperopic writer suddenly becomes myopic, his manner of
thinking, and consequently of writing, at once is modified. What I call
the school of the myopes, Gautier names the school of the rabids. He
said to Merimee: 'Your characters have no muscles,' and Merimee
answered, 'Yours have no draperies.'"
But there is one consequence, common both to Flaubert and to Hearn, a
most strange unity of result flowing from a seemingly opposed but really
identical cause in the two men. I have elsewhere set forth the reasons
for my belief that the secret of Flaubert's life, character, and
literary art consisted in an inability to think and write at the same
time. He was one of the most healthy and brilliant of men when he did
not read or write, but his mind refused to act creatively whenever he
wrote or read. From this resulted his epilepsy. Fathered by the fear of
this disease, mothered by opium, and reared by unhygiene and eye-strain,
came the miserable "St. Anthony" of the second remaking. In the failure
of this pitiful work there was naught left except bottomless pessimism,
the "cadenced phrase," and all the rest, called "Madame Bovary" and "art
for art's sake."
There never was a greater sufferer from eye-strain than Flaubert, whose
eyes were strikingly beautiful, and seemingly of extraordinary
perfection as optical instruments. From this fact flowed the entire
tragedy of the man's life and of his life-work. His friend du Camp says
that had it not been for his disease he would have been, not a writer of
great talent, but a man of genius. Hearn had the most defective
eyesight, he was indeed nearly blind; but physically he suffered little
from this cause,--and yet his choice of subjects and methods of literary
workmanship, and every line he wrote, were dictated and ruled by his
defect of vision. Opium, with the impossibility of writing and creating
at the same time, dominated Flaubert's work and working, and the similar
result was begot by Hearn's enormous monocular myopia.
From Martinique, before I had met him, Hearn wrote me:
I am very near-sighted, have lost one eye, which disfigures
me considerably; and my near-sightedness always prevented
the gratification of a natural _penchant_ for physical
exercise. I am a good swimmer, that is all.
In reply to nearly all the questions about my
near-sightedness I might answer, "Yes." I had the best
advice in London, and observe all the rules you suggest.
Glasses strain the eye too much--part of retina is gone. The
other eye was destroyed by a blow at college; or, rather, by
inflammation consequent upon the blow. I can tell you more
about myself when I see you, but the result will be more
curious than pleasing. Myopia is not aggravating.
In "Shadowings," the chapter on "Nightmare-Touch," Hearn describes with
his gift of the living word the dreams and hauntings he endured when as
a boy he was shut in his room in the dark. It is a pitiful history, and
shows how a child may suffer atrociously from the combination of an
abnormally exuberant fancy and eye-strain, probably with added ocular
disease. The subjective sensations and images were alive and Hearn's
innate tendency to the horrible and hideous gave them the most awful of
nightmarish realities.
I have already given (facing page 5) a copy of a little photograph of
Hearn at about the age of eight, standing by Mrs. Brenane. It will be
seen that the right eyeball was at this time about as large and
protruding as in later life. This leaves a doubt whether the destruction
of the left was due to the blow at college at the age of sixteen. In one
of my letters he uses the word "scrofulous" in alluding to himself.
It was not only during the last years of his life, that, as he says, "it
was now largely a question of eyes." It was always the most important of
all questions; first, physically and financially, because all hung upon
his ability to write many hours a day. How his little of visual power
was preserved under the work done is a marvel of physiology. So
unconscious was Hearn of the influence of eye-strain in ruining the
health of others (he himself had no eye-strain in the ordinary meaning
of the term) that he wonders why the hard students about him were
inexplainably dying, going mad, getting sick, and giving up their
studies. This is hardly to be considered a fault of Hearn when educators
and physicians and oculists the world over, never suspect the reason.
Moved by sympathy, and perhaps by the vaguest feeling that to Hearn's
poor vision were due, in part at least, both his personal and literary
characteristics, I early besought him to make use of scientific optical
helps in order to see the world better, and to carry on his writing with
greater ease, and with less danger to the little vision left him. He had
but one eye, which was evidently enormously nearsighted. The other had
been lost in youth. I found that he had about 25 diopters of myopia, to
use the jargon of the oculist, and that consequently he knew little
about the appearance of objects even a few feet away. In writing he was
compelled to place the paper or pen-point about three inches from his
eye. With the proper lens it was possible to give him vision of distant
objects about one-fourth as clear as that of normal eyes. For a minute
my disappointment was equal to my surprise when I found that he did not
wish to see with even this wretched indistinctness, and that he would
not think of using spectacles or eyeglasses. Later I found the reason
for his action. He sometimes carried a little lens or monocle in his
pocket, which somewhat bettered his vision, but in the several months he
spent with me I saw him use it only once or twice, and then merely for
an instant. I am almost sure that the reason for this preference for a
world almost unseen, or seen only in colours, while form and outline
were almost unknown, was never conscious with Hearn, although his mind
was alert in detecting such psychologic solutions in others. In studying
his writings, this reason finally has become clear to me.
When one chooses an artistic calling, Fate usually, and to the artist
unconsciously, dictates the kind of art-work and the method of carrying
it to realization. The blind do not choose to be painters, but
musicians; the deaf do not think of music, though nothing prevents them
from being good painters. The dumb would hardly become orators or
singers, but they might easily be sculptors, or painters, or designers.
It is as evident that the poet is largely a visualizer, if one may so
designate this psychic function, and without sight of the world of
reality and beauty, poetry will inevitably lack the charm of the real
and the lovely. Every great writer, in truth, shows more or less clearly
that the spring and secret of his imagination lie preponderantly in the
exceptional endowment, training, or sensitiveness of one of the
principal senses of sight, hearing, or touch. A thousand quotations
might be made from each of a dozen great writers to prove the thesis.
The man born blind, however, cannot become a poet, because true poetry
must be conditioned upon things seen--"simple, sensuous, and passionate"
demands the great critic; but interwoven and underrunning the
simplicity, the passion, and the sense, is and must be the world as
mirrored by the eye. All thinking, all intellectual activity, is by no
means of the image and the picture; all words are the product of the
imagining, and the very letters of the alphabet are conventionalized
pictures.
Physiologically, or normally, the perfection of the artist and of his
workmanship thus depends upon the all-round perfection of his senses,
the fulness of the materials and of his experience which these work on
and in, and the logical and aesthetic rightness of systematization.
Conversely, a new pathology of genius is coming into view which shows
the morbidizing of art and literature through disease, chiefly of the
sense-organs of the artist and literary workman, but also by unnatural
living, selfishness, sin, and the rest. As Hearn was probably the most
myopic literary man that has existed, his own thoughts upon _The
Artistic_ _Value of Myopia_ are of peculiar interest. In 1887 one of
his editorials in the _Times-Democrat_ runs as follows:--
Probably more than one reader, on coming to page 15 of
Philip Gilbert Hamerton's delightful book, "Landscape," was
startled by the author's irrefutable statement that "the
possession of very good eyesight may be a hindrance to
those feelings of sublimity that exalt the poetic
imagination." The fact is, that the impressiveness of
natural scenery depends a great deal upon the apparent
predominance of _mass_ over _detail_, to borrow Mr.
Hamerton's own words; the more visible the details of a
large object,--a mountain, a tower, a forest wall, the less
grand and impressive that object. The more apparently
uniform the mass, the larger it seems to loom; the vaguer a
shadow-space, the deeper it appears. An impression of
weirdness,--such as that obtainable in a Louisiana or
Florida swamp-forest, or, much more, in those primeval and
impenetrable forest-deeps described so powerfully by
Humbolt,--is stronger in proportion to the spectator's
indifference to lesser detail. The real effect of the scene
must be a _general_ one to be understood. In painting, the
artist does not attempt miscroscopic _minutiae_ in treating
forest-forms; he simply attempts to render the effect of
the masses, with their characteristic generalities of
shadow and colour. It is for this reason the photograph can
never supplant the painting--not even when the art of
photographing natural colours shall have been discovered.
Mr. Hamerton cites the example of a mountain, which always
seems more imposing when wreathed in mists or half veiled
by clouds, than when cutting sharply against the horizon
with a strong light upon it. Half the secret of Dore's
power as an illustrator was his exaggerated perception of
this fact,--his comprehension of the artistic witchcraft of
_suggestion_. And since the perception of details depends
vastly upon the quality of eyesight, a landscape
necessarily suggests less to the keen-sighted man than to
the myope. The keener the view, the less depth in the
impression produced. There is no possibility of mysterious
attraction in wooded deeps or mountain recesses for the eye
that, like the eye of the hawk, pierces shadow and can note
the separate quiver of each leaf. Far-seeing persons can,
to a certain degree, comprehend this by recalling the
impressions given in twilight by certain unfamiliar, or by
even familiar objects,--such as furniture and clothing in a
half-lighted room. The suggestiveness of form vanishes
immediately upon the making of a strong light. Again,
attractive objects viewed vaguely through a morning or
evening haze, or at a great distance, often totally lose
artistic character when a telescope is directed upon them.
In the February number of _Harper's Magazine_ we find a very
clever and amusing poem by the scholarly Andrew Lang upon
this very theme. The writer, after describing the
christening-gifts of various kindly fairies, tells us that
the wicked one--
--Said: "I shall be avenged on you.
My child, you shall grow up nearsighted!"
With magic juices did she lave
Mine eyes, and wrought her wicked pleasure.
Well, of all the gifts the Fairies gave,
_Her's_ is the present that I treasure!
The bore, whom others fear and flee,
I do not fear, I do not flee him;
I pass him calm as calm can be;
I do not cut--I do not see him!
And with my feeble eyes and dim,
Where _you_ see patchy fields and fences,
For me the mists of Turner swim--
_My_ "azure distance" soon commences!
Nay, as I blink about the streets
Of this befogged and miry city,
Why, almost every girl one meets
Seems preternaturally pretty!
"Try spectacles," one's friends intone;
"You'll see the world correctly through them."
But I have visions of my own
And not for worlds would I undo them!
This is quite witty and quite consoling to myopes, even as a
cynical development of Philip Gilbert Hamerton's artistic
philosophy. Still, it does not follow that the myope
necessarily possesses the poetic faculty or
feeling;--neither does it imply that the presbyope
necessarily lacks it. If among French writers, for example,
Gautier was notably nearsighted, Victor Hugo had an eye as
keen as a bird's. It is true that a knowledge of the effect
of shortsightedness on the imagination may be of benefit to
a nearsighted man, who, possessing artistic qualities, can
learn to take all possible advantage of his myopia,--to
utilize his physical disability to a good purpose; but the
longsighted artist need not be at a loss to find equally
powerful sources of inspiration--he can seek them in morning
mists, evening fogs, or those wonderful hazes of summer
afternoons, when the land sends up all its vapours to the
sun, like a smoke of gold. Beaudelaire, in his _Curiosites
Esthetiques_, made an attempt to prove that the greatest
schools of painting were evolved among hazy
surroundings--Dutch fogs, Venetian mists, and the vapours of
Italian marsh-lands.
The evolutionary tendency would seem to indicate for future
man a keener vision than he at present possesses; and a
finer perception of colour--for while there may be certain
small emotional advantages connected with myopia, it is a
serious hindrance in practical life. What effect keener
sight will have on the artistic powers of the future man,
can only be imagined--but an increasing tendency to realism
in art is certainly perceptible; and perhaps an interesting
chapter could be written upon the possible results to art of
perfected optical instruments. The subject also suggests
another idea,--that the total inability of a certain class
of highly educated persons to feel interest in a certain
kind of art production may be partly accounted for by the
possession of such keen visual perception as necessarily
suppresses the sensation of breadth of effect, either in
landscape or verbal description.
Thus, according to Flaubert, the myope looks at things one after another
and describes details, while Hearn says the exact opposite. Both are
wrong. The oculist will feel constrained to differ somewhat from Hearn
in the foregoing article.
In May 1887 he reviews editorially an article of my own which I had sent
him during the preceding year. Again, because there has never been a
literary artist with a colour-sense so amazingly developed as that of
Hearn, I venture to copy his commendation of my views:
COLOURS AND EMOTIONS
(May 8, 1887)
The evolutionary history of the Colour-Sense, very prettily
treated of by Grant Allen and others, both in regard to the
relation between fertilization of flowers by insects, and
in regard to the aesthetic pleasure of man in contemplating
certain colours, has also been considered in a very
thorough way by American thinkers. Perhaps the most
entertaining and instructive paper yet published on the
subject was one in the _American Journal of Ophthalmology_
last September. It has just been reprinted in pamphlet
form, under the title of "The Human Colour-Sense as the
Organic Response to Natural Stimuli;" and contains a
remarkable amplification of these theories, rather
suggested than laid down by the author of "Physiological
AEsthetics." Of course, the reader whom the subject can
interest, comprehends that outside of the mind no such
thing as colour exists; and that the phenomena of colours,
like those of sound, are simply the results of exterior
impressions upon nerve apparatus specially sensitive to
vibrations--in the one case of ether, in the other of air.
Everybody, moreover,--even those totally ignorant of the
physiology of the eye--know that certain colours are called
primary or elementary. But it has probably occurred to few
to ask why,--except in regard to mixing of paints in a
drawing-school.
The theories of Gladstone and Magnus that the men of the
Homeric era were colour-blind, because of the absence from
the Homeric poems of certain words expressive of certain
colours, have been disproved by more thorough modern
research. The primitive man's sense of colour, or the
sensitiveness of his retina to ether vibrations, may not
have been as fine as that of the Roman mosaic-worker who
could select his materials of 30,000 different tints, nor as
that of Gobelin weavers, who can recognize 28,000 different
shades of wool. But the evidence goes to show that the sense
of colour is old as the gnawing of hunger or the pangs of
fear,--old as the experience that taught living creatures to
discern food and to flee from danger. There is, however,
reason to suppose, from certain developmental phenomena
observed in the eyes of children and newly-born animals,
that the present condition of the colour-sense has been
gradually reached--not so much in any particular species, as
in all species possessing it,--just as vision itself must
have been gradually acquired. Also showy colours must have
been perceived before tints could be discerned; and even now
we know through the spectroscope, that the human eye is not
yet developed to the fullest possible perceptions of colour.
Now the first colours recognized by the first eyes must have
presumably been just those we call primary,--Yellow, Red,
Green, Blue. Yellow, the colour of gold, is also the colour
of our sun; the brightest daylight has a more or less faint
tinge even at noon, according to the state of the
atmosphere;--and this tinge deepens at sunrise and sunset.
Red is the colour of blood,--a colour allied necessarily
from time immemorial with violent mental impressions,
whether of war, or love, or the chase, or religious
sacrifice. Green itself is the colour of the world.
Blue,--the blue of the far away sky,--has necessarily always
been for man the colour mysterious and holy,--always
associated with those high phenomena of heaven which first
inspired wonder and fear of the Unknown. These colours were
probably first known to intelligent life; and their
impressions are to-day the strongest. So violent, indeed,
have they become to our refined civilized sense, that in
apparel or decoration three of them, at least, are
condemned when offered pure. Even the armies of the world
are abandoning red uniforms;--no refined people wear flaming
crimsons or scarlets or yellows;--nobody would paint a house
or decorate a wall with a solid sheet of strong primary
colour. Blue is still the least violent, the most agreeable
to the artistic sense; and in subdued form it holds a place,
in costume and in art, refused to less spiritual colours.
It might consequently be expected there should exist some
correlation between the primary colours and the stronger
emotional states of man. And such, indeed, proves to be the
case. Emotionally the colours come in the order of Red,
Yellow, Green, Blue. Red still appeals to the idea of
Passion,--for which very reason its artistic use is being
more and more restrained. Very curious are the researches
made by Grant Allen showing the fact of the sensual use of
the red. In Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads "(the same
suppressed work republished in this country under its first
title, "Laus Veneris"), the red epithets appear 159 times,
while gold, green and blue words occur respectively 143, 86
and 25 times. In Tennyson's beautiful poem, "The Princess,"
the red words occur only 20 times, the gold 28, the green 5,
the blue once. With all his exquisite sense of colour,
Tennyson is sparing of adjectives;--there is no false skin
to his work; it is solid muscle and bone.
Next to Red, the most emotional colour is Yellow--the colour
of life, and of what men seem to prize next to life,--Gold.
We fancy we can live without green sometimes; it comes
third; but it is the hue associated with all the labours of
man on the earth, since he began to labour. It is the colour
of Industry. Blue has always been, since man commenced to
think, and always will be, until he shall have ceased to
think,--associated with his spiritual sense,--his idea of
many gods or of One,--his hopes of a second life, his faith,
his good purposes, his perception of duty. Still, all who
pray, turn up their faces toward the eternal azure. And with
the modern expansion of the Idea of God, as with the modern
expansion of the Idea of the Universe, the violet gulf of
space ever seems more mystical,--its pure colour more and
more divine, and appeals to us as the colour of the
Unknowable,--the colour of the Holy of Holies.
That Hearn wrote not from his own experience, out of his own heart, and
with its blood, was due to the fact that life had denied him the needed
experience; the personal materials, those that would interest the
imaginative or imagining reader, did not exist. He must borrow, at
first literally, which for him meant translation or retelling. The kind
of things chosen was also dictated by the tragedy and pathos of his
entire past life. But as if this pitiful tangling of the strands of
Destiny were not enough, Fate added a knot of still more controlling
misfortune. His adult life was passed without the poet's most necessary
help of good vision. Indeed he had such extremely poor vision that one
might say it was only the merest fraction of the normal. A most hazy
blur of colours was all he perceived of objects beyond a foot or two
away. There was left for him the memory of a world of forms as seen in
his childhood; but that fact throws into relief the fact that it was a
memory. It needs little psychologic acumen to realize how inaccurate
would be our memories of trees, landscapes, mountains, oceans, cities,
and the rest, seen only thirty years ago. How unsatisfying, how
unreliable, especially for artistic purposes, must such memories be! To
be sure, these haunting and dim recollections were, or might have been,
helped out a little by pictures and photographs studied at the distance
of three inches from the eye. The pathos of this, however, is increased
by the fact that Hearn cared nothing for such photographs, etchings,
engravings, etc. I never saw him look at one with attention or interest.
Paintings, water-colours, etc., were as useless to him as the natural
views themselves.
Another way that he might have supplemented his infirmity was by means
of his monocle, but he made little use of this poor device, because he
instinctively recognized that it aided so meagrely. One cannot be sure
how consciously he refused the help, or knew the reasons for his
refusal. At best it could give him only a suggestion of the accurate
knowledge which our eyes give us of distant objects, and not even his
sensitive mind could know that it minimized the objects thus seen, and
almost turned them into a caricaturing microscopic smallness, like that
produced when we look through the large end of an opera-glass. What
would we think of the world if we carried before our eyes an opera-glass
thus inverted? Would not a second's such use be as foolish as continuous
use? There was an optical and sensible reason for his refusal. With the
subtle wisdom of the unconscious he refused to see plainly, because his
successful work, his unique function, lay in the requickening of ancient
sorrows, and of lost, aimless and errant souls. He supplemented the
deficiencies of vision with a vivid imagination, a perfect memory, and a
perfection of touch which gave some sense of solidity and content, and
by hearing, that echo-like emphasized unreality; but his world was
essentially a two-dimensional one. To add the _comble_ to his ocular
misfortunes, he had but one eye, and therefore he had no stereoscopic
vision, and hence almost no perception of solidity, thickness, or
content except such as was gained by the sense of touch, memory,
judgment, etc. The little glimpse of stereoscopic qualities was made
impossible by the fact of his enormous myopia, and further by the
comparative blindness to objects beyond a few inches or a few feet away
from the eye. The small ball becomes flat when brought sufficiently near
the eye. Practically the world beyond a few feet was not a
three-dimensional one; it was coloured it is true, and bewilderingly so,
but it was formless and flat, without much thickness or solidity, and
almost without perspective.[18] Moreover, Hearn's single eye was
divergent, and more of the world to his left side was invisible to him
than to other single-eyed persons. Most noteworthy also is another
fact,--the slowness of vision by a highly myopic eye. It takes it longer
to see what it finally does see than in the case of other eyes. So all
the movements of such a myopic person must be slow and careful, for he
is in doubt about everything under foot, or even within reach of the
hands. Hearn's myopia produced his manners.
[18] I have gathered, but must omit, a hundred illuminating
quotations from Hearn's writings, illustrating the truth of
the formlessness and non-objectivity of his world, and how
colour dominated his poorly seen universe.
Intellect, one must repeat, is largely, almost entirely, the product of
vision,--especially the aesthetic part of intellect. And intellect, it
should not be forgotten, is "desiccated emotion"; which brings us up
sharply before the question of the effect upon aesthetic and general
feeling, upon the soft swirl and lift and flitting rush of the emotional
nature, in a psyche so sensitive and aerial as that of Hearn. In this
rare ether one loses the significance of words, and the limitations of
logic, but it may not be doubted that in the large, the summarized
effect of thirty years of two-dimensional seeing and living, of a flat,
formless, coloured world, upon the immeasurably quick, sensitive plate
of Hearn's mind, was--well, it was what it was!
And who can describe that mind! Clearly and patently, it was a mind
without creative ability, spring, or the desire for it. It was a mind
improcreant by inheritance and by education, by necessity and by
training, by poverty internal and external. To enable its master to
live, it must write, and, as was pitifully evident, if it could not
write in obedience to a creative instinct, it must do the next best
thing. This residual second was to describe the external world, or at
least so much of the externals of all worlds, physical, biological, or
social, as romance or common-sense demanded to make the writing vivid,
accurate, and bodied. Any good literature, especially the poetic, must
be based on reality, must at least incidentally have its running
obligato of reality. For the poet, again emphasized, vision is the
intermediary, the broad, bright highway to facts. Prosaically, local
colour requires the local seer. Barred from this divine roadway to and
through the actual universe, the foiled mind of Hearn could choose but
one course: to regarment, transform, and colour the world, devised and
transmitted by others, and reversing the old [Greek: o logos sarx
egeneto] rewrite the history of the soul as [Greek: sarx o logos
egeneto], for in Hearn's alembic the solidest of flesh was "melted" and
escaped in clouds of spirit; it was indeed often so disembodied and
freed that one is lost in wonder at the mere vision of the cloudland so
eerie, so silent, so void, so invisibly far, and fading ever still
farther away. But, chained to the _here_ Hearn could not march on the
bright road. He could never even see the road, or its ending. If freed
to go, _there_ became _here_ with the intolerable limitation of his
vision, the peculiarity of his unvision. The world, the world of the
_there_ must be brought to him, and in the bringing it became the
_here_. In the process, distant motion or action became dead, silent,
and immobile being; distance was transformed to presence, and an
intimacy of presence which at one blow destroyed scene, setting, and
illumination. For, except to passionate love, nearness and touch are not
poetical or transfiguring, and to Hearn love never could come; at least
it never did come. Except in boyhood he never, with any accuracy of
expression or life, saw a human face; at the best, he saw faces only in
the frozen photographs, and these interested him little.
With creative instinct or ability denied, with the poet's craving for
open-eyed knowing, and with the poet's necessity of realizing the world
out there, Hearn, baldly stated, was forced to become the poet of
myopia. His groping mind was compelled to rest satisfied with the world
of distance and reality transported by the magic carpet to the door of
his imagination and fancy. There in a flash it was melted to formless
spirit, recombined to soul, and given the semblance of a thin
reincarnation, fashioned, refashioned, coloured, recoloured. There, lo!
that incomparable wonder of art, the haunting, magical essence of
reality, the quivering, elusive protean ghost of the tragedy of dead
pain, the smile of a lost universe murmuring _non dolet_ while it dies
struck by the hand of the beloved murderer.