Hyperion to Bellarmin
Our souls now lived ever more freely and beautifully together, and everything in and around us commingled into golden peace. It seemed as if the old world had died and a new one were beginning with us, so spiritual and strong and loving and light had everything become, and we and all beings floated in blissful union, like a chorus of a thousand inseparable tones, through the boundless aether.
Our converse glided away like a cerulean stream whence the gold- sand now and then glitters, and our silence was like the silence of mountain-peaks where in glorious lonely height, far above the realm of the storms, only the divine breeze whispers still in the locks of the bold wanderer.
And the wonderful holy sorrow when the hour of parting rang into our rapture, when often I cried: ‘now we are mortal again, Diotima!’ and she said to me: ‘Mortality is illusion, it’s like the colours that quiver before our eye when it looks long into the sun!’
Oh! and all the sweet games of love! the pretty speeches, the petty worries, the touchiness, the strictness and indulgence.
And the omniscience with which we saw through one another, and the infinite faith with which we glorified one another!
Yes! man is a sun, all-seeing, all-illuming when he loves, and if he doesn’t he’s a dark dwelling in which there burns a reekie little lamp.
I ought to keep silent, ought to forget and keep silent.
But the alluring flame will tempt me till I plunge into it whole and perish like the fly.
In the midst of all this blissful wholehearted giving and taking, I felt one day that Diotima was becoming stiller and ever stiller.
I asked and I begged; but this only seemed to distance her the more; finally she begged that I no longer ask, that I should go, and speak of something else when I returned. This brought about a painful dumbness in me too, which I myself couldn’t come to grips with.
I felt as if an unfathomable sudden fate had sworn death to our love, and all life was gone, from me and everything.
It’s true I was ashamed of this; I knew for sure that Diotima’s heart was not ruled by caprice. But always she remained a mystery to me, and my spoiled despondent disposition demanded that love be always
palpable and present; locked-up treasures were treasures lost for me. Oh! in my happiness Id unlearned hope, I was then still like impatient children who cry over the apple on the tree as though it weren’t there at all unless it’s kissing their mouths. I had no peace, again I begged, violently and meekly, tenderly and angrily, love armed me with all of its all-overpowering humble eloquence and now — O my Diotima! now [had it, the delightful confession, now I have and will hold it till the tide of love carries me too, with all that I am, back to the ancient home, into the womb of nature.
The innocent! she’d yet to know the powerful abundance of her heart, and sweetly dismayed at the wealth within her, she buried it deep in her breast — and when she now confessed, holy simplicity, when she confessed with tears that she loved too much, and when she took leave from all she’d cradled till then to her heart, oh, when she cried: ‘I’ve fallen away from May and summer and autumn, and don’t heed the day and the night as once I did, don’t belong any longer to heaven and earth, belong just to one, only to one, but the blossom of May and the flame of summer and the ripeness of autumn, the lightness of day and the gravity of night, and earth and heaven, all is fused for me into this one! so do I love!’ — and when she now looked at me, in the fullness of her heart’s content, when she, in bold and holy joy, took me into her beautiful arms and kissed me on brow and mouth, oh! when that divine head, dying in bliss, slipped down my open neck, and those lovely lips rested on my beating breast and the sweet breath touched my soul — O Bellarmin! my senses fail and my mind runs adrift.
I see, I see how this must end. The rudder has fallen into the surge and the ship will be seized like a child by the feet and hurled against the rocks.