I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 62
A WISH that God would come personally to see me flutters in my thoughts ever and anon like a restless moth.
I am in a prison-mood and coldly content to be in it. For how long content—content is not the word: despairingly acquiescent—there's no word to express that—I can noway tell. But now I live and breathe aloof and strange-mooded. And with it I wish God would visit me a moment.
It is not a strong wish. Yet restless and persistent.
I want to be free from myself and away, loosed in the little broad big narrow World: but first and more I want God to visit me.
I want people again, those away from here who are my friends—some glowing-spirited ones who appreciate my Mind and cater to me: I want, I think, a poet to love me with some unobvious madness: but first and more I want God to visit me.
More than I want strength of spirit and flesh, more than I want a fat mental peace, more than I want to know John Keats in star-spaces: more than I want my dream-Child: I want God to visit me.
More than I wish this appalling tiredness would leave me: more than I wish this I write to be a realization, a de-fait portrait of the thin-hidden Me, my self-expression achieved: more than I want to be quit of my two black dresses and back in the wide sweet frivol of variegated clothes: I want God to visit me.
God must know all about that. He must have known it a long time. He still does not come. If he would come and tell me one thing, one certain thing, it would be enough. It would show me a direction and I could keep on in it by myself. If God would tell me even a sheerest matter-of-fact, for sure—like What O'Clock by his time it really is: that would be a spark from which I could build an eternal fire for myself. Forever after I could dispense with God as a personality.
I am strangely weak. Strong of will, strong of mind, but weak of purpose: damnably, damnedly. I shall never be able to write in words one one-thousandth of the dramatic drastic weakness which is in me. But I hate weakness with so deep and strong a hatred, and to know one eternal certain thing would be so roundly restful, I could then go on: I could vanquish the potent pettinesses which beset me.
I do not want from God a passport, a safe-conduct into heaven. I don't want to get into heaven. I don't know what it is, but the word has sounds of finality, as if all winds, sweet nervous petal-laden winds, had stopped blowing forever. For cycles and centuries to come the Soul of me will be too restless to live where winds can not blow.
I love the journey: so that only I might have one dim torch to go by. I love the pitfalls and ditches—all the dangers—black-shaded woods and wolds, and lonesome plains and briery paths, and very wet swamps, and strong whistling gales which chill me: so that I could feel but one tiny bright-bladed truth, within and without, pricking and urging me to struggle on through it all till I might emerge at last like a human being, rather than linger indifferent and inanimate like a jaded wood-nymph in drearily pleasant spaces.