Esse

Esse

I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of Metro stations flew by; I
didn't notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to
devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void
of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an
animal or bird. A slightly stub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back
hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in
a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous
lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background
of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it
back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a
butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell
me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat,
harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can
attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong
marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of
existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river,
suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

-Czeslaw Milosz, 1954