Letter to an actress: "From what you told me last night I see that you do not know your power. You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this. I felt this last night as I watched you act Cinderella, that you were whatever you acted, that you touched that point at which art and life meet and there is only BEING. I felt your hunger and your dreams, your pities and your desires at the same time as you awakened all of mine. I felt that you were not acting but dreaming; I felt that all of us who watched you could come out of the theatre and without transition could pass magically into another Ball, another snowstorm, another love, another dream. Before our very eyes you were being consumed by love and the dream of love. The burning of your eyes, of your gestures, a bonfire of faith and dissolution. You have the power. Never again use the word exhibitionism. Acting in you is a revelation. What the soul so often cannot say through the body because the body is not subtle enough, you can say. The body usually betrays the soul. You have the power of contagion, of transmitting emotion through the infinite shadings of your movements, the variations of your mouth's designs, the feathery palpitations of your eyelashes. And your voice, your voice more than any other voice linked to your breath, the breathlessness of feeling, so that you take one's breath away with you and carry one into the realm of breathlessness and silence. So much power you have Sabina! The pain you felt afterwards was not the pain of failure or of exhibitionism, as you said, it must be the pain of having revealed so much that was of the spirit, like some great mystic revelation of compassion and love and secret illusion, so that you expected this to have been communicated to others, and that they should respond as to a magic ritual. It must have been a shock when it did not happen to the audience, when they remained untransformed. But to those who respond as I did, you appear as something beyond the actor who can transmit to others the power to feel, to believe. For me the miracle took place. You seemed the only one alive among the actors. What hurt you was that it was not acting, and that when it ended there was a break in the dream. You should have been protected from the violent transition. You should have been carried off the stage, so that you would not feel the change of level, from the stage to the street, and from the street to your home, and from there to another party, another love, another snowstorm, another pair of gold slippers.