The Voice

I was the height of a folio, my bed just backed on the bookcases’ sombre Babel, everything, Latin ashes, Greek dust jumbled together: novel, science, fable. Two voices spoke to me. One, firmly, slyly, said: ‘The Earth’s a cake filled with sweetness: I can give you (and your pleasure will be endless!) an appetite of comparable vastness.’ The other said: ‘Come! Come voyage in dream, beyond the known, beyond the possible!’ And that one sang like the ocean breeze, phantom, from who knows where, its wail caressing the ear, and yet still frightening. You I answered: ‘Yes! Gentle voice!’ My wound and what, I’d call my fatality, begins alas, from then. From behind the scenery of vast existence, in voids without light, I see the strangest worlds distinctly: ecstatic victim of my second sight, snakes follow me striking at my feet. Since then, like the prophets, I greet the desert and the sea with tenderness: I laugh at funerals, I cry at feasts, wine tastes smooth that’s full of bitterness: and, eyes on the sky, I fall into holes, and frequently I take facts for lies. But ‘Keep your dreams!’ the Voice consoles, ‘Madmen have sweeter ones than the wise!’