Shortly before the call to afternoon prayers, I went to the Japanese Garden*7 and sat down on a bench, oblivious of what was going on around me, aware only of my own thoughts in lurid collision with one another: By what means? And when?

I’d only slept an hour the night before. The wind blew, my head grew heavy, daylight was rapidly fading. Lassitude crept over me.

When I opened my eyes it was dusk, darkness falling with ponderous slowness; I must have slept for an hour or more. I got up from the bench—to find myself rising with unexpected buoyancy, filled with energy. My head was free of fever, my heart from its weight—how marvelous!—gloom had dispersed, depression had vanished, and I was a completely different person. When had he been born? How had he been born? And why? What had happened in the space of an hour?

I hadn’t slept through an hour, but an era, from which I’d awakened into a new one. Something had happened during my sleep, something so preciously significant that surely, had it not been for this joy at sudden recovery, this joy that had loosened at last my death grip on memory and cast into oblivion even the recollection of priceless things, I might have been able to call to mind at least an inkling of the onset of this miraculous change. I could only think that somehow I must have completed a long and successful journey. From where otherwise—and how—had the resurrection come? Incomprehensible, unbidden, perhaps undeserved—but so tangible, so real that it could be seen and felt, in the very midst of spiritual emptiness and physical destitution, despite all opposition, obstacles, losses, and sorrows—this joy was all I wanted to cling to, this ecstasy, as if to a talisman. Let its strength remain unfathomably in its mystery! Lo, its life-giving force marches forward, bearing with it the fragrance of triumph!

I set out at once for the station, which was no mean distance away, and with every step new vigor rushed in, as full of promise as great clouds laden with rain—potentiality, feeling, responsiveness, far above and beyond the fact that I was penniless and pursued and carried sadness with me. Only after I’d covered a considerable stretch did I suddenly remember the note and realize that it was too late to retrieve it. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that nothing mattered now—let whatever might happen to that letter happen, whatever the outcome might be—except to keep on going. This ecstasy at its peak may glow on a body stripped by penury, bared to its own aridity, but on a will that the challenge of joy has made free.

*1 Abu al-Ala al-Maarry (973–1057), born near Aleppo, was a blind poet-philosopher who is said to have been a skeptic, freethinker, and materialist.

*2 The first verse of the Fatha, Sura I, Koran.

*3 Female characters in well-known Arab love lyrics.