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THE same soldier, who has become my war-time “god-child,” writes to me again:
“I experience an ineffable delight in remaining the average man and in professing emptiness. I felt a great peace descend within me on the day when I resigned myself to the common lot, in other words, to ignorance and death. I have found life by renouncing it and, now that I am no longer anything, I feel rich indeed. Do not tempt me in the direction of that subtle spiritual vanity which constitutes one of the most formidable obstacles to the final liberation from self. Proud I certainly was and I am still only too much so; but we cannot extract virtues otherwise than from our vices. More ardently than when I embraced the phantom of individual superiority, I stretch my arms towards homogeneous equality, towards the fullness of vacancy....”