PREFACE

Love is more piercing than hatred. It hears what is said. It hears what is not said. It hears silence, reads what is not written, and guesses what must be guessed in order to grow. It increases by its discoveries, enriches itself with its treasures, and then complains of its poverty, in order to extract new secrets.

When she Refers to the soul of the mystic, Angela, or the personification of Love questions the abyss of the height, her word is but a cry of helplessness, an eternal lamentation; she weeps over the limit that stops her in her flight at the moment of departure. Her eloquence consists of complaining that she cannot say what she feels, and this complaint, repeated at every moment, is never monotonous, because it is always true.

Striking in her flight against the ineffable: that which is too great or sacred to be expressed in words secrets, the unrevealed mysteries, she looks like an eagle which, having taken its flight from the top of the mountain where the snow is eternal, reaches regions where there is no longer, even for it, breathable air. Her thoughts fail her. She descends again, struggles against the words that in turn fail her, engages them in hand-to-hand combat, where she is at once defeated and victorious, and then she looks like an eagle which, clutching and shaking them in its talons—for it remembers the mountain and the desert—shakes the bars of its cage...

In the twenty-seventh chapter, several souls