The Passion According to G.H. Read Free

my useless sin.
    I am so afraid that I can only accept that I got lost if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.
    Holding someone’s hand was always my idea of joy. Often before falling asleep — in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and enter the greater world — often, before having the courage to go toward the greatness of sleep, I pretend that someone is holding my hand and I go, go toward the enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even then I can’t find the courage, then I dream.
    Going to sleep so closely resembles the way I now must go toward my freedom. Handing myself over to what I don’t understand would be placing myself at the edge of the nothing. It will be just going, and like a blind woman lost in a field. That supernatural thing which is life. Life that I had tamed to make it familiar. That brave thing that will be handing myself over, and which is like grasping the haunted hand of the God, and entering that formless thing that is a paradise. A paradise that I don’t want!
    While writing and speaking I will have to pretend that someone is holding my hand.
    Oh, at least at the beginning, just at the beginning. As soon as I can let go, I will go alone. In the meantime I must hold this hand of yours — though I can’t invent your face and your eyes and your mouth. Yet even amputated, that hand doesn’t scare me. Its invention comes from such an idea of love as if the hand really were attached to a body that I don’t see only because I can’t love enough. I cannot imagine a whole person because I am not a whole person. And how can I imagine a face without knowing what expression I need? As soon as I can release your warm hand, I’ll go alone and with horror. The horror will be my responsibility until the metamorphosis is complete and the horror becomes light. Not the light born of a desire for beauty and moralism, as before without realizing I intended; but the natural light of whatever exists, and it is that natural light that terrorizes me. Though I know that the horror — I am the horror in the face of things.
    For now I am inventing your presence, just as one day I won’t know how to risk dying alone, dying is the greatest risk of all, I won’t know how to enter death and take the first step into the first absence of me — just as in this last and so primary hour I shall invent your unknown presence and with you shall begin to die until I learn all by myself not to exist, and then I shall let you go. For now I cling to you, and your unknown and warm life is my only intimate organization, I who without your hand would feel set loose into the enormous vastness I discovered. Into the vastness of the truth?
    But the truth never made sense to me. The truth doesn’t make sense! That is why I feared it and fear it. Helpless, I give you everything—so you can make a joyous thing of it. Will speaking to you scare you and make me lose you? but if I don’t speak I’ll be lost, and in losing myself lose you.
    The truth doesn’t make sense, the greatness of the world restricts me. What I probably asked for and finally got, left me needy as a child wandering the earth alone. So needy that only the love of the entire universe for me could console me and overwhelm me, only a love that trembled the very egg-cell of things with what I am calling a love. With what I can really only call but without knowing its name.
    Could what I saw have been love? But what love is as blind as that of an egg-cell? was that it? that horror, was that love? a love so neutral that — no, I still don’t want to speak to myself, speaking now would hasten a meaning like someone swiftly freezing into the paralyzing security of a third leg. Or am I just putting off starting to speak? why don’t I just say nothing and simply buy some time? Out of fear. I need courage to venture making something concrete out of my feeling. It’s like having a coin and not knowing in which country it is legal tender.
    I