My dear poet, you’ll have to forgive me, but I don’t know either. It’s a rumor. A fleeting shadow. A will-o’-the-wisp. Is this what Yoni went to look for God-knows-where? What Azariah came here to seek? Is there such a thing at all? I can’t help smiling as I write this—a man of my age and position mewling like a schoolboy about whether love exists. And yet I insist on asking, does it or does it not? And if it does, how can it possibly when all other things contradict it?

I could take, for example, any father and son. Or any two brothers. Or any husband and wife. All of them, like carriers of the same mysterious virus, harboring their own particular loneliness, their own particular estrangement, their own particular pain, and their own dark desires to inflict such pain on others. Or if not to inflict pain, to use others. To change them. To mold them. To dominate them. To reshape whomever they most love like a lump of putty in their hands. As the waters cover the sea. If I had a son or daughter of my own—a Rimona, say, or a Yoni or Azariah—then would not the cruel inner tyrant in me be brought out too, like a monstrous shadow emerging from the darkness to knead, crush, and reform that child in its own image or that of its most secret desires? Had I dared when I was young to tell P. I loved her, and had she agreed to be mine, wouldn’t a Fifty Years’ War have broken out on the spot? The Gorgon and the Basilisk? Who will subdue whom? Who will bend whom to his will? And even assuming that such a hideous struggle had taken on the subtlest, most genteel form possible, without claws, without blows, without even a raised voice, would that have been any comfort? How would that have helped to rid us of the pain? For that matter, what can a man of modest ambition do by himself to mitigate the pain, even in his own immediate circle?

Having spent my whole life in sterile observation of what goes on outside my window, I know that in the end there’s no way, that pain inheres too deeply in the nature of things, that we are attracted to it like moths to a flame in whatever good or bad we do, and that implicit in all our carnal appetites, in our most private sexual fantasies, in our philosophies, in our parental roles, in our friendships, in our creativity, even in our declared intention of ministering to the suffering around us, is the secret wish to inflict yet more pain as well as to suffer it. What an infernal verse in Genesis: “Sin lieth at the door, and unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” Perhaps it means:

To take pain.

To inflict it.

To pity.