The Goddess Abides: A Novel by Pearl S. Buck Page A

I would find one another. It is the moment of death that I must analyze, if such analysis is possible. Is this moment only a fraction of time or is it—eternity?” His voice fell to a sudden whisper upon that awesome word.
    She considered, deeply thoughtful, “I suppose,” she said at last and hesitating very much, for though she had thought long about Arnold’s death, yet she felt humble before this virile old philosopher, “I suppose that one approach might be to limit the definition of death by eliminating what we know it is not. For example, we know that the body returns to dust and is no more in its present components.”
    “Exactly,” he exclaimed triumphantly; “therefore let us eliminate the body. That’s used and put aside forever. But what’s left, the self—can we go further than to say that at least the idea of its continuance is a reality? Or to put it otherwise, how much of a reality is the mere idea of it? Take atomic energy, released as fission between atomic elements. It existed first as an idea, did it not? It existed, but how much and how long? If the idea were right, then it was real to that degree. If it had been wrong—and ideas can be mistaken and therefore wrong, and therefore unreal—it would have existed briefly or not at all. Yet might it not, for all that, have existed in itself and forever, as an idea? In other words again, the beginning of any reality is contained in an idea.”
    “Springs from an idea?” she suggested.
    He repudiated this. “No, the idea is the first reality.”
    “The possibility of reality,” she amended.
    “Aha, I’ve got you!” he cried in triumph. “Then the possibility is in itself a reality, isn’t it?”
    She pondered and made reply. “But possibility is not continuance!”
    “No, but continuance is not entirely negated, so long as there is the possibility of continuance.”
    She laughed. “So how to get out of this tangle?”
    He did not laugh or even smile. Indeed he became intensely serious. Releasing her hand, which all this time he had continued to hold, he seemed to forget her presence.
    “By the intuitions,” he mused. “If perpetuity is the reality of space, of energy, of atoms themselves, shall it be denied to us, who know our being? I reject the absurdity!”
    She listened, enthralled, caught and held in the brilliant outpouring of words and logic and so continued for hours. When at last the clock struck twelve he stopped abruptly. “Good heavens, how I go on! And your angelic patience! Come to bed, my love.”
    And in her bedazzlement, quite forgetting that she had planned otherwise, she let herself be led away.
    …In the night she felt herself enfolded and, waking, she found him at her side. In the moonlight she saw his face above her, amazing in its strong beauty. Age revealed the outlines of perfect bone structure, the eyes, still burning bright, were steel blue beneath silvered brows. He had a tender mouth, not small, not large, the lips delicately sculptured, and suddenly she felt them on her own, passionately tender.
    “I have been watching my love asleep,” he murmured, “so beautiful in sleep, my darling!”
    “Have you not slept?” she asked.
    “I will not,” he replied. “I want to know you are here—every moment I want to know. You give me certainty. I shall survive. I know, because I live! There is that substance in life which cannot yield to death. Plato was convinced of it, long ago. I have the right to live, my beloved. It would be too great an injustice, too irrational a waste, were I to die—I or any other who demands life. Survival will be because it ought to be. This is the great moral imperative.”
    Enfolded, uplifted and encouraged, she felt her love for him rise upward as though on wings. She adored him with a sense of worship. His spirit, bold and brave, the ardor of his nature, the brilliance of his mind, piercing beyond knowledge, awed her and gave her protection. If there were one in whom she