Note 3 — Chapter VIII

Cf. Dr van Dijk, Maeterlinck, pp. 26 ff.; "Now in order to find the life interior you must be at the other end of all your agitations, you must be behind your conscious thoughts, words, and deeds. Behind all that makes you finite, keeps you finite, lies the infinite; the ocean of the infinite flows round you there, and there lie the ice-fields of mystery, the great treasures of the unconscious, there are the deeps of the interior sea. There is no longer that which has an end, a bound, a limit, that which is shared and divided, that which is joined and separated, there is perfect identity of all things, there is everywhere and always identical mystery, there God is. There it is, too, says Maeterlinck, that we first understand each other, for subtle, tender bonds are there between all souls.... When you now, with Maeterlinck, turn your back on the conscious in every form, it follows that even the best word will always be a more or less disturbing wrinkle, a wrinkle that darkens the unmoving silent waters of the unconscious. Think and put your thoughts into words, and you must move further and further in the direction of the conscious; that is, in the direction of that which is limited and the limiting." Cf. one of the opening sentences of the essay "La Morale mystique": "As soon as we express something, we diminish it strangely. We think we have dived to the depth of the abysses, and when we reach the surface again the drop of water glittering at the end of our pale fingers no longer resembles the sea it came from."