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mistake, as with all the sanctimonious, is to feel that rightness, indeed truth itself, is all, and solely, on its side. There is a rightness outside, and countermanding, moral rightness, even as there are moral acts of such beauty as to overwhelm us and to make us, indeed, fall in love with the good. And what of truth's own terrible and mighty beauty - must we deprive even truth even at its worst of all its one-time loveliness? Are mathematicians wrong to find "pretty" solutions to complex problems the "truest," "elegant" answers to thorny questions the most convincing? Was Occam an art critic at heart? And what of the awe of beauty before the hardest, the harshest, of truths? (We should go gently here, for we are dealing with matters delicate and painful; the wounds beneath our fingers are still raw. It is the truth of 
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the wound we are speaking of, and to find anything beautiful or redemptive in the wound as it bleeds, in the suffering that allows no sleep, might seem malicious, mocking. . . .) And yet - is there in fact nothing one can find? Nothing, indeed? truly, nothing? A cry of pain startles me awake. You pull over, or get up, or, despite your unease, go back to sleep: you have heard the cry in the night, you have been torn from yourself into a world not your own yet not to be denied. A stern love whispers into your ear: is this not another face of beauty? Is this not a beauty whose truths can fathom absolute darkness like a golden pail down an infinite well, dropping until it creates the water it is seeking? The quest for truth has always required a suppression of our quest for sensuous delight,  |
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