'I shall die--I shall quickly die,' said Ursula to herself, clear as if
in a trance, clear, calm, and certain beyond human certainty. But
somewhere behind, in the twilight, there was a bitter weeping and a
hopelessness. That must not be attended to. One must go where the
unfaltering spirit goes, there must be no baulking the issue, because
of fear. No baulking the issue, no listening to the lesser voices. If
the deepest desire be now, to go on into the unknown of death, shall
one forfeit the deepest truth for one more shallow?
'Then let it end,' she said to herself. It was a decision. It was not a
question of taking one's life--she would NEVER kill herself, that was
repulsive and violent. It was a question of KNOWING the next step. And
the next step led into the space of death. Did it?--or was there--?
Her thoughts drifted into unconsciousness, she sat as if asleep beside
the fire. And then the thought came back. The space o' death! Could she
give herself to it? Ah yes--it was a sleep. She had had enough So long
she had held out; and resisted. Now was the time to relinquish, not to
resist any more.
In a kind of spiritual trance, she yielded, she gave way, and all was
dark. She could feel, within the darkness, the terrible assertion of
her body, the unutterable anguish of dissolution, the only anguish that
is too much, the far-off, awful nausea of dissolution set in within the
body.
'Does the body correspond so immediately with the spirit?' she asked
herself. And she knew, with the clarity of ultimate knowledge, that the
body is only one of the manifestations of the spirit, the transmutation
of the integral spirit is the transmutation of the physical body as
well. Unless I set my will, unless I absolve myself from the rhythm of
life, fix myself and remain static, cut off from living, absolved
within my own will. But better die than live mechanically a life that
is a repetition of repetitions. To die is to move on with the
invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is
greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to
live mechanised and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as
an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious.
There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an
unreplenished, mechanised life. Life indeed may be ignominious,
shameful to the soul. But death is never a shame. Death itself, like
the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying.