When I arrived yesterday, I found your letter. How I would like to be more than a man, to reassure you, and to heal the one you love so much.
I believe, as you know, that the World is an immense plastic thing to the influences of the Spirit. We will therefore bandage our desires, so that the Principle, necessarily good, which superanimates all things, gives back to your friend his forces. This desire, and this hope, and this supplication for the immediate and tangible good, is the first duty, which the Gospel itself teaches us.
But, in our present Universe, nothing, it is too clear, can absolutely resist, but everything must yield sooner or later to the forces of death. Your love of life is a healthy and beautiful power, and you must jealously guard that spirit of resistance to physical debasement, which helps you through the evil. But, in your attitude, there is still something missing: you have not yet come to love all of Life, all of the Universe, enough to accept (the inevitable moment having come) to diminish (in appearance) and pass lovingly into it. We must fight death with all our strength, because it is our essential duty as living people. But when, by virtue of a state of affairs (transitory, no doubt, – but inevitably linked to the state of growth of the World) death takes us, we must have that paroxysm of faith in Life which makes us surrender to death as to a fall into the more-Life. To love Life so much, and to trust it so much, that we embrace it and throw ourselves into it even through death, – this is the only attitude that can calm and strengthen you: to love madly the greater than yourself. Any union, especially with a larger one, involves a kind of death to oneself. Death is only acceptable if it represents the passage (physically necessary) to a union, – the condition for a metamorphosis.
Fulfillment of Man. Grasset, 1968, p. 97-98.
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