Of the making of books there is no end. Tons of them emerge daily from the laboring presses. What innumerable things they tell! Yet much more they leave untold.
There are thoughts men do not write down, but hide them as their shame. Every author has visions unrecorded, fears unsaid, hopes not breathed. If his silent soul would but become vocal—what a book!
The world is full of vast reticences. There is the dark half of the moon, forever unlit, unseen.
There are the crowded mysteries of the stars. Of them we get but tiny points of light. What is going on in those globes, many of them colossal beside ours? No entertaining correspondent has ever sent us any news. We and stellar folk gaze wonderingly at each other, forever dumb.
Your dogs look at you with such eager eyes. How he longs to grasp your meaning. And to us he and all animaldom are a dark pit. What do bees and birds think?
Beneath the mirror surface of the ocean are more lives than in our air; between us a shut door; all their business an impenetrable secret.
We human beings are enigmas to each other. Even in love’s confessional is a residue unspoken.
There are things in you that you have never told a soul. You have had suggestions whispered to you by your inner self which you have hurriedly rejected, amazing impulses you have promptly clamped down; you refuse to admit even to yourself that you have had them.
What beast-hungers, what crime-forces, what incoherent anarchies, what wild cries are there, battened down under the hatches of your soul!
Two that have lain side by side for years have each concealed in the heart, locked up in the mind’s keep, weird, pale prisoners of memory that only peer out through grated windows, in dreams or in morbid moments, and shall die with them.
We know but the surfaces of souls, but the symbols of things. None of us was ever present at the wedding of hydrogen and oxygen, or ever saw an atom-dance, or was ever present at the birth of conscience. The significant affairs of the world take place behind veils.
“Est-ce que la vie d’une femme se raconte?” asked Sainte-Beuve. “Can a woman’s life be recorded?”
Let us be very loath to judge one another, and avoid harsh and hard estimates, for we know little of what passes in the deeps of souls.
“What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.”
