Today, lingering even longer than usual, Death came to my door to sell her wares. Lingering even longer than usual, she laid out before me the rugs, silks, and damasks of her oblivion and her consolation. She smiled with satisfaction at her goods, and didn't care that I could see her smile. However, when I tried to buy something, she told me it wasn't for sale. She hadn't come because she wanted me to buy, but so I would want her because of what she had brought me. And she told me that her rugs were the rugs from her distant palace; that her silks were the only ones worn in her dark domain; and that even finer damasks covered the altars in her home beyond the world.

She gently released me from the bonds that had long kept me tethered to my austere home. "There is no fire in your hearth," she said, "so why have a hearth?" "There is no bread on your table," she said, "so why have a table?" "You have no companion," she said, "so why cling to life?". "I," she said, "am the fire in cold hearths, the bread on empty tables, the solicitous companion of the lonely and ignored. In my great domain you will find the worldly glory that eluded you here. In my empire, love never wearies because it does not long to possess; nor does it suffer because it fails to possess. I place my hand gently on the heads of those who think, and they forget; those who waited in vain rest their head on my bosom and are filled with a sense of confidence and trust."

"The love they feel for me," she said, "is devoid of consuming passion or mad jealousy, nor is it tainted by neglect. Loving me is like a summers night, when beggars sleep out in the open and resemble shadows lying by the roadside. From my silent lips you will hear no siren songs, no melodiously rustling trees or burbling fountains; my silence is as welcoming as an inaudible music, my peace as caressing as the merest thought of a breeze."

"What binds you to life?" she said. "Love does not seek you out, nor does glory, and power has never found you. The house you inherited is a house in ruins. The crops in the fields you were given were scorched by frost, the promised harvest seared by the sun. The well on your estate has long since run dry. The lilies in your pond rotted before you even saw them. Weeds filled the paths and avenues that your feet never trod.

"But in my domain, where eternal night reigns, you will find consolation, because there you will have no hope, only forgetting, you will yearn for nothing, but will find rest, because you will have no life." And she showed me how futile it was to hope for better days, when one was not born with a soul capable of finding better days. She showed me how dreams do not console because life only hurts all the more when one wakes. She showed how sleep brings no rest because it is haunted by ghosts, by the shadows of things, by the traces left in the air by gestures, by the dead embryos of desires, by flotsam from the shipwreck of the living.

And speaking thus, she slowly, even more slowly than usual, rolled up her rugs I had found so tempting, the silks so coveted by my soul, the damasks from the altars on on which my tears were falling.

Why try to be like other people, if you are condemned to being you? Why laugh, if, when you laugh, your own genuine joy is false, because it is born out of your forgetting who you are? Why weep if you feel it will not help, when you weep more because your tears fail to console you than because they do?

If you are happy when you laugh, then I have won; if you are happy because you have forgotten who you are, how much happier you will be with me, where you will remember nothing at all. If you achieve perfect rest, if you perhaps sleep a dreamless sleep, how deeply you will rest on my bed, where all sleep is dreamless? If you momentarily rise up because you have seen something beautiful, and you forget about yourself and about Life, how much higher you will rise in my palace, whose nocturnal beauty knows no discord, no age, no corruption; in my rooms where no wind disturbs the curtains, no dust covers the chairbacks, no light fades the velvets and the upholstery, and no time yellows the blank whiteness of the white walls?

Come, enjoy my affection which never changes, and my love, which has no end! Drink from my inexhaustible cup the supreme, nectar which neither wearies nor embitters, which neither nauseates nor inebriates. Contemplate from my castle window not the moonlight and sea, which are beautiful and therefore imperfect, but the vast, maternal night, the consummate splendor of the deep abyss!

In my arms you will forget the painful path that brought you to them. In my embrace you will no longer feel the love that made you seek it out! Sit beside me on my throne, and you will forever be the undethroneable emperor of the Mystery and the Grail, you will coexist with the gods and with the fates, in being nothing, in having neither a here nor a hereafter, in having no need even of those things of which you have excess or that you lack or of which you have sufficient.

I will be your maternal wife, your long-lost twin sister found at last. And once I am married to all your anxieties, once everything you were looking for and did not find has returned to me, then you will become lost in my mystical substance, in my nonexsistence, in my breast where all things founder, in my breast where all souls are extinguished, in my breast where even the gods vanish.