"rslcm10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yeats William Butler)

you to leave me at once, for your ideas and phantasies are but the
illusions that creep like maggots into civilizations when they begin
to decline, and into minds when they begin to decay.' I had grown
suddenly angry, and seizing the _alembic_ from the table, was
about to rise and strike him with it, when the peacocks on the door
behind him appeared to grow immense; and then the _alembic_ fell
from my fingers and I was drowned in a tide of green and blue and
bronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly I heard a distant
voice saying: 'Our master Avicenna has written that all life proceeds
out of corruption.' The glittering feathers had now covered me
completely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of years,
and was conquered at last. I was sinking into the depth when the
green and blue and bronze that seemed to fill the world became a sea
of flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard a
voice over my head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two pieces,' and
another voice answer, 'The mirror is broken in four pieces,' and a
more distant voice cry with an exultant cry, 'The mirror is broken
into numberless pieces'; and then a multitude of pale hands were
reaching towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, and
half wailing and half caressing voices uttering words that were
forgotten the moment they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the
tide of flame, and felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will,
everything I held to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise
through numberless companies of beings who were, I understood, in
some way more certain than thought, each wrapped in his eternal
moment, in the perfect lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of
rhythmical words, in dreaming with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids.
And then I passed beyond these forms, which were so beautiful they
had almost ceased to be, and, having endured strange moods,
melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight of many worlds, I passed
into that Death which is Beauty herself, and into that Loneliness
which all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that had
ever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart, and I in theirs; and
I had never again known mortality or tears, had I not suddenly fallen
from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream, and
become a drop of molten gold falling with immense rapidity, through a
night elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant
wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the wailing was but the
wailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke to find myself
leaning upon the table and supporting my head with my hands. I saw
the _alembic_ swaying from side to side in the distant corner it
had rolled to, and Michael Robartes watching me and waiting. 'I will
go wherever you will,' I said, 'and do whatever you bid me, for I
have been with eternal things.' 'I knew,' he replied, 'you must need
answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must
come to a great distance, for we were commanded to build our temple
between the pure multitude by the waves and the impure multitude of
men.'