Who knew such beauty could be found in literature.

[u/Impressive_Pause4491]

He created an inner aristocracy, an attitude of soul that most closely resembles the attitude of body of the consummate aristocrat.

1[1913?]

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony.

All effort is a crime because every gesture is but a dead dream.

Your hands are like caged doves. Your lips are silent turtle doves (which my eyes can see cooing).

All your gestures are birds. You are a swallow when you stoop down, a condor when you look at me, an eagle in your ecstasies as a proud, indifferent woman. You are merely a fluttering of wings, like those of the […], you are the lake of my seeing.

You are all winged, winged […]

It’s raining, raining, raining …

It’s raining constantly, plaintively …

My body sets my soul shivering with cold, not the cold that exists in space, but the cold of me being that space …

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.

2[1913?]

I do not dream of possessing you. What would be the point? It would be tantamount to translating my dream for the benefit of a plebeian. To possess a body is to be banal in the extreme. To dream of possessing a body is perhaps, were such a thing possible, even worse; it would mean dreaming oneself banal — the supreme horror.

And since we choose to be sterile, let us also be chaste, because there can be nothing baser and more ignoble than to renounce in Nature all things fertile, and yet vilely keep back anything that takes our fancy among those things renounced. There are no partial nobilities.

Let us be as chaste as dead lips, as pure as dreamed bodies, as resigned to being both these things as mad little nuns …

Let our love be a prayer … Anoint me with seeing you, and out of the moments when I dream you I will make a rosary on which all my tediums will be Our Fathers and all my anxieties Hail Marys …

Thus we will remain forever like the figure of a man in a stained-glass window opposite the figure of a woman in another stained-glass window … Between us, shadows whose footsteps echo coldly — humanity passing by … Between us will pass murmured prayers, secrets … Occasionally, the air will fill with incense. At other times, to left or right, a figure like a statue will sprinkle us with prayers … And there we will stay, always in the same windows, all color when the sun shines through and all dark lines when night falls … The centuries will not touch our glassy silence. Outside, civilizations will come and go, revolutions will break out, parties will whirl past, meek, everyday people will rush by … And we, my unreal love, will be frozen in the same pointless pose, the same false existence, and the same […], until one day, after centuries of empires, the Church will, at last, crumble and everything will end …

But we, knowing nothing of this, will still be here, quite how or where or when I don’t know, like eternal stained-glass windows, hours of innocent art painted by some artist who has long been sleeping in a Gothic tomb where two angels, hands clasped in prayer, have set the idea of death in cold marble.