...of meditation

The next day, as early as possible, he climbed up to the loft, sat down, placed the frame on the stool against the wall, and waited without lighting the lamp. The only noises he heard clearly were coming from the kitchen or the toilet. Other sounds seemed distant, and the visits, the ringing of the doorbell or the telephone, the comings and goings, the conversations reached him half muffled, as if they were coming from the street or from the other courtyard. Besides, when the whole apartment was flooded with a harsh light, the darkness here was restful. From time to time a friend would come and camp beneath the loft. "What are you doing up there, Jonas?" - "I'm working." - "Without light?" - "Yes, for the time being." He was not painting, but he was meditating. In the darkness and this half-silence which, compared to his previous experience, seemed to him the silence of the desert or the grave, he was listening to his own heart. The sounds that reached the loft did not seem to concern him now, even if they were addressed to him. He was like those men who die at home alone in their sleep, and when morning comes the telephone rings and keeps ringing, urgent and insistent, in the deserted house, over a corpse forever deaf. But he was alive, he was listening to this silence within himself, he was waiting for his star, still hidden but ready to rise again, to emerge at last, unchanged, above the disorder of these empty days. "Shine, shine," he would say. "Don't deprive me of your light." It would shine again, he was sure of it. But he still needed more time to meditate, since at last he had a chance to be alone without being separated from his family. He needed to discover what he had not yet clearly understood, although he had always known it, and had always painted as if he knew it. He had to grasp at long last that secret which was not merely the secret of art, he could see. That is why he did not light the lamp.

[Jonas, from Exile And The Kingdom, Camut, A.]