The Last Evening of the Year

Today I spend the last evening of this year turned toward the memory of earlier days. Inwardly, a peculiar object is charged, forming, and gathering itself; outwardly, almost everything is banal. I am still the same man who cuts wood and carries water, the same man who eats when hunger comes, who walks beneath the sun, who lies down when night has taken the day, and perhaps I appear as I did yesterday.

Yet it seems to me that my development, my life force, my thoughts, my eros—all that has carried me forward—have been secretly converging upon this hour, secretly arranging themselves behind my back, secretly preparing a form I could not yet see, as though the scattered years had known something of their destination before I did.

What I called ambition was not only ambition. What I called desire was not only desire. What I called thought was not merely thought, but the visible crest of a deeper movement whose source remained hidden from me. Something moved beneath them, using each in turn, drawing me through victories and errors, through longing, work, solitude, pleasure, life, and the uncanny roads by which man is led back toward himself.

Happy new year to you, damned Saad.

But—

Behold.

The night returned.

And with the night came something I had known before. I did not summon it. I had made no ceremony for it. I was merely walking among men as men walk at night, when the heat of the day has departed and the streets become inhabited again. Then I felt the old charge. A familiar one that I recognized instantly.

It did not first appear to me as a thought. It entered the flesh before the mind had made anything of it. My step altered. My chest seemed to remember its old breadth. My eyes no longer searched the street but received it. The people around me became strangely near and strangely unimportant. I felt again that peculiar abundance which asks nothing from the world and therefore seems capable of taking everything from it.

Then the voice came. It was my voice, and yet I heard in it something that had been absent. It spoke without haste. It did not explain itself. It did not ask whether it had been understood. When another man offered me something, the voice answered as though acceptance and refusal were equally inexpensive. When a woman looked toward me, it did not rush toward her gaze. When the world displayed its ornaments before me, the voice seemed almost amused.

I remembered another time.

There had been a man with almost nothing. A black shirt. A body made strong by use. Empty pockets. No machine working somewhere in his absence. No proof of future abundance. No kingdom that others could see. Yet he walked as though deprivation had failed to inform him that he was deprived. I had believed that man belonged to an earlier life.

But the night contradicted me. For now the ornaments had arrived. Money had arrived. Men knew my name. Women knew my face. Things that once stood beyond imagination could now be purchased without greatly disturbing the order of my life. And still I walked. Then I understood why the return disturbed me. The old force had not been waiting for these things. It had preceded them. What I later acquired had not created it. If anything, abundance had concealed from me the strangeness of having possessed it when there had been no external reason for it.

I looked at the machines of men passing through the street, polished and loud, carrying their owners beneath the lamps. Once perhaps I would have imagined that possession of such things would complete some unfinished sentence in me. Yet the voice said:

Walk.

So I walked.

It seemed absurd that a man who could now acquire the symbols should discover that he had once possessed, in poverty, the thing for which the symbols were purchased. Then eros stirred.

Not merely desire for a woman. Something wider moved through the body: appetite for the night, for faces, for movement, for being seen and seeing, for the nearness of other bodies, for laughter emerging without permission, for the strange commerce by which life recognizes life.

I did not want the night to end. This surprised me. For there had been years in which I withdrew my life from such things and placed it elsewhere. I built. I thought. I descended. I made systems. I spoke with figures. I learned to endure rooms that gave me no answer.

But now the street itself answered.

Here.

The voice did not say: Become what you were. It did not say: You have returned. It said almost nothing of this kind. It simply inhabited me.

And because it did not explain itself, I became aware of how often explanation follows life like a beggar asking for ownership of what has already occurred. I wished to name the force.

I stopped myself. For perhaps a thing that has returned should first be permitted to return.

Then I saw more clearly what had changed.

In earlier days the force rushed outward. It wanted the room, the woman, the gaze, the conquest. It could make a myth before the other person had finished speaking. It mistook the intensity arising within itself for information about the object that awakened it.

Tonight the same fire came, but another vessel stood around it.

Then Liber Flavus spoke:

The development of man begins when he understands that he need not seduce the feminine, but must build within himself a vessel large enough to contain what the feminine awakens in him. For otherwise he mistakes the woman for the myth that has gathered around her.

I heard this and became still. For man believes that because a woman awakens the god, the woman must therefore be the god. He feels an ancient movement and attributes its antiquity to her. He sees the kingdom rise and crowns the one who happened to be standing at its gate.

Then he calls this love, fate, seduction, loss. But perhaps development begins when man can suffer the whole rising of the kingdom without forcing the woman to become its queen. The fire need not be extinguished. The woman need not be diminished. The myth need not be mocked. Only the vessel must become larger.

Then man may say:

Something enormous has happened in me.

And still look across the table and see a woman.