If I say I am enchanting or false or despicable it is because I know
it’s true. Not because I say it but because I have tested and proved
it. I feel the textures of my life with the tips of my fingers. I
turn my senses outward and let the old winds blow over them--icy,
balmy, harsh, gentle, scorching, cooling. I suffer for it but I know
those winds: songs of seas and stars and of little pebbles are in
their thunderous-dim wailing: life is in the soft stinging perfume of
their wings.
No breath of poetry and beauty comes to me that I do not pay for with
the beating ache of my Heart, the nervous tensions of my Body, the
fraying and shredding of my Soul. If any beauty or poet-thing comes
easily and gives me pleasure and not pain, I know I have not yet got
it and that it will come again.
It will come again: with the pain.