14. Krishnamurti's Notebook

In June 1961, Krishnamurti continued his journey from London to Ojai, via New York The day before his flight to Los Angeles, he began keeping a diary. He wrote in pencil almost every day for nine months. He had never done this before, and when asked about it later, he could not remember why he had started and why then.

The notes recount his observations, but not a single person is mentioned by name. K writes about trees, flowers, and animals, and describes the people he sees, but not those he talks with.

The diary begins on 18 June 1961 and the final entries are dated in March 1962, while he was in India. However, the book was not published until 1976, when it caused a wave of astonishment.

In many ways, the book is extraordinary. It opens up the world as seen through Krishnamurti's eyes. The descriptions are vivid yet simple, and sometimes slightly confusing. The language is beautiful in its simplicity, and the text reiterates familiar concepts from his talks, such as truth, meditation, and thinking. Religion and death are also discussed, albeit less dogmatically than in his talks.

This diary does not try to teach anything; it is not written for anyone in particular, but rather for everyone. It enchantingly describes that something beyond our everyday understanding.

It Was Present and Filled the Room

We cannot know what K means by the words like 'process', 'blessing' or 'otherness', which he describes already in the first entry.

"In the evening it was there; suddenly it was there, filling the room, a great sense of beauty, power and gentleness. Others noticed it."

The next day, he said that 'something' had been there all night, whenever he was awake. It 'cleansed his brain'.

It would be foolish to try to describe something so overwhelming. K feels it, but always in a slightly different way. It has no pattern; it never repeats itself. Thought always has form and structure, this is why it remains a mystery to thought.

K stresses that self-critical awareness is essential. Imagination and illusion distort clear observation.

"Illusion will always exist, so long as the urge for the continuation of pleasure and the avoidance of pain exist; the demand for those experiences which are pleasurable to continue or to be remembered; the avoidance of pain, suffering. Both these breed illusion. To wipe away illusion altogether, pleasure and sorrow must be understood, not by control or sublimation, identification or denial. Only when
the brain is quiet, can there be right observation. Can the brain ever be quiet? It can when the brain, being highly sensitive, without the power of distortion, is negatively aware."

Nothing Sacred in the Brain

Thought can put together the intricacies of systems, dogmas, beliefs, and the images and symbols. These projects are no more holy than the blueprints for a house or the design for a new aeroplane.

"There is nothing sacred or mystical about all this. Thought is matter and it can be made into anything, ugly – beautiful."

Sacredness is not of thought. It cannot be expressed, yet it is a fact. When a fact is interpreted, it ceases to be a fact.

Seeing the truth is out of time-space; it is immediate. What is seen is never the same again. Sacredness has no worshipper, no observer who meditates upon it. It is not in the market to be bought or sold.

"That presence is here, filling the room, spilling over the hills, beyond the waters, covering the earth."

The body is just an empty, functioning organism.

The Beginning and the End of Everything

On 1 July, K wrote: "The beginning and the ending are here, of all things. There is really nothing that can be said about it."

However, on 20 July, he tried to describe that state of mind:

"It was the centre of all creation; it was a purifying seriousness that cleansed the brain of every thought and feeling; its seriousness was as lightning which destroys and burns up; the profundity of it was not measurable, it was there, immovable, impenetrable, a solidity that was as light as the heavens. It was in the eyes, in the breath.

As a terrific storm, a destructive earthquake gives a new course to the rivers, changes the landscape, digs deep into the earth, so it has levelled the contours of thought, changing the shape of the heart."

Three days later, K wondered why all this was happening. No explanation is enough, no matter how many you can come up with. Yet, K mentions four things:

• One must be wholly indifferent to it coming and going.
• There must be no desire to continue the experience or to store it away in memory.
• There must be a certain physical sensitivity, a certain indifference to comfort.
• There must be self-critical humorous approach.

One thing is certain: the brain can never comprehend or can it contain it. That bliss always comes unexpectedly and, with each visit, there is a transformation deep within us. It is never the same, and no god can give it to us.

In Saanen's first talk, the process is going on, rather gently, and it intensifies in the afternoon.

"One felt utterly vulnerable, naked and very open; one hardly seemed to exist."

K also notes how easy it is to deceive oneself, to project the desirable states which are not actually experienced. To avoid self-deception, it is crucial not to ask for anything.

The Cup Overflowing

On 28 July K wrote: "All the morning the process was on and a cup that had no height and no depth seemed to be full to the overflowing."

On 2 August, K sat on the bed before getting up. That immense benediction came, and he felt that this whole power, this whole impenetrable, stern strength was in him, about him and in his head. There was complete stillness.

One can't imagine or describe that. It has no cause, and the brain cannot capture it. It was out of time, and K could not say whether it lasted a minute or an hour.

Shortly before breakfast on 5 August, there was a flash of 'seeing', 'looking', that seemed to go on for ever. It went beyond the streams, the hills, the mountains, past the earth and the horizon and the people. Like a knife thrust into a soft earth, there was that benediction. It came as does lightning and was gone as quickly.

The next day, the benediction blossomed, and K felt as though it was operating on him.

During the seventh Saanen talk, immensity and its benediction were present. For K, it was "a strength that has no value in man's social structure and behaviour. But it is there, unconcerned, immense, untouchable. Because of this, all things are."

Experiencing is conditioned by previous experiences. When the brain ceases to nourish itself through experience, memory and thought, then its activity is no longer self-centred.

On waking on 11 August, an intense, bright light was at the very centre of his brain, at the very centre of consciousness. This light had no shadow nor was it set in any dimension. It was strength and beauty beyond thought and feeling.

The beauty of a picture, a song or a building is put together by humans, to be compared, to be criticised, to be added up. There is also another kind of beauty. To see it, we need a total innocence and total austerity that thought is incapable of achieving.

Bliss Comes When It Will

In a note dated 18 August, K used the word 'otherness' to describe a world that could never be touched by human thought. This is not the product of hope or belief.

Otherness fills the mind and heart with beauty and love, not the kind that can be captured in sculpture. It has no centre, no periphery either. That bliss comes whenever it wants and is different every time.

Thought is superficial. Experiencing a fact without thought is total seeing. The beauty of life cannot be contained within even the largest of thoughts, and its depth has no end.

Understanding will never come tomorrow; it is now or never. Seeing is immediate. It is explosive, not reasoned, calculated. Seeing is not only with the brain but also beyond it. Seeing the fact brings its own action, entirely different from the action of ideas, which breeds conflict.

To see something, there must be humility, whose essence is innocence. Then it is something totally new. It involves the
totality of one's being, and is passively active. The brain is completely still but fully awake. In this total attention is silence. Out of this emptiness the new is.

Reality Is Not a Reward

In the 31 August entry, K writes about meditation. It's an incredible phenomenon when there's no pattern or goal.

Meditation is not the silly calculations of the brain in search of security. There is great beauty in silence. Silence is emptiness in which and from which all things flow and have their being.

Silence is unknowable; neither intellect nor feeling can make their way to it. A method to it is the invention of a greedy brain. All the ways and means of the calculating self must be destroyed. The passage of time must come to an end.

Meditation is destruction; it is a danger to those who wish to lead a superficial life or a life of fancy and myth.

K points out that the power to create illusions is vastly more significant to understand than to understand reality.

"The power to breed illusion must cease completely, not to gain reality; there is no bargaining with fact. Reality is not a reward; the false must go, not to gain what's true but because it is false."

Power Is the Torch of Evil

In early September, K flew to Paris, where he delivered nine talks.

On 6 September, otherness became as real as the rooftops with their hundreds of chimneys that he could see from the window of his room.

The next day, he said that without meditation, the heart becomes a desert, a wasteland. Meditation has its own movement and you just have to let it happen. This movement destroys the observer, the experiencer.

"Power is always evil, wielded by the politician or by the saint or by the wife over the husband. It's the torch of evil that continues from generation to generation. Few can put it aside, widely and freely,

without looking back; they have no reward. Reward is success, the halo of recognition. Not to be recognised, failure long forgotten, being nobody when all striving and conflict has ceased, there comes a blessing which is not of the church of the gods of man."

Thought Builds Its Own Prison

Thought can project itself into the future, but it is tied to yesterday. It builds its own prison, whether it's gilded or plain. Thought is restless, ever pushing and withdrawing. The machinery of thought is always in motion. Thought can refine itself, control its wanderings, it can choose its direction and adapt to its environment, but it can never go beyond itself. It always moves within the limitations of memory. Memory must die psychologically and function only outwardly.

Otherness emerges from time to time, always slightly different – so different that it is impossible to say anything about it. It surprises K on his walks and is present when he sleeps and when he wakes up in the morning.

Meditation "crept on one like a wave covering the sands" and the whole brain yielded without any resistance.

A Mutation Is Fundamental

On 17 September, K used a new word which he also used in his talk that day. A mutation is a fundamental change in consciousness, both open and hidden. The upper level of consciousness can and does modify itself and adjust itself to conform to new social and economic patterns, but such changes are superficial and brittle.

Analysing the hidden implies the observer and the observed, but this does not bring about a transformation in consciousness. It requires a mutation that draws no lines between different parts of the mind.

The next day, K continued to reflect this new concept when he presented his unique idea of meditation.

"Meditation breaks down the frontiers of consciousness; it breaks down the mechanism of thought and the feeling which thought arouses. It is freeing of energy in abundance, and control, discipline and suppression spoil the purity of that energy."

Meditation is like a flame burning intensely without leaving any ashes. It destroys everything, leaving not even a whisper of desire.

No effort or reason can transform consciousness. When all this is recognised as false, the consciousness rejects the wrong way and the denial of the false empties consciousness. This is mutation.

"It is not the positive state of being, nor the not being. It is emptiness: in this fire of emptiness the mind is made young, fresh and innocent," as K puts it.

The next day, K sat meditating on the terrace of his apartment and later described his experience:

"Meditation was gladness. There was no reason for this ecstasy. With this joy there was benediction. It was all so utterly beyond all thought and demand."

Death to time is life in the present. Time is thought in consciousness, and consciousness is held within its frame. There is always fear and sorrow within the network of thought and feeling. The ending of sorrow is the ending of time.

With or Without Thought

From Paris, K flew to Rome and continued writing.

"To see wholly, the brain has to be in a state of negation," he wrote on 25 September.

"In a state of negation, the brain is choicelessly still. In this total seeing there is no seer, no observer, no experiencer; there is only seeing."

It's one thing to look with or without thought. Looking with thought keeps the brain in the groove of habit and recognition. However, looking without thought doesn't fatigue the brain, on the contrary, it is fully awake, attentive, without friction or pain. Attention without the constraints of time is the flowering of meditation.

On 9 October, otherness came back with a force.

"The intense energy of life is always there, night and day. It is without friction, without direction, without choice and effort. It is there with such abundance that nothing can diminish it."

However, every action of envy perverts this energy, causing discontent, misery and fear. Energy used in one direction leads to one thing, conflict and sorrow, whereas energy that is the expression of total life is bliss beyond measure.

On 12 October, K was on a train. Otherness was present in the smoky compartment, where "the passengers hardly looked out of the window. All that night, it was there with such intensity that the brain felt its pressure. It was as though at the very centre of all existence".

His brain watched it as it was watching the scene racing by, and in this very act it "went beyond its own limitations. And during the night at odd moments, meditation was a fire of explosion".

On 18 October, K flew to Bombay. On his last night in Rome, the meditation had been "an opening into immeasurable emptiness".

The brain was still for no cause. It was so still that the limited space of the room had disappeared and time stopped. The brain could hear the rain and movement in the next room, and "meditation yielded to the otherness". This peace was a vast, boundless space of immeasurable emptiness.

The Empty Brain Is Not a Vacuum

"The complete stillness of the brain is an extraordinary thing", begins the entry for 23 October. "This emptiness is not a state of vacuum, a blankness; it is energy without a centre, without a border."

"Time is illusion", K writes on 26 October. Thought uses time as a means to bring about inward psychological change, but mutation is not possible through time. The very denial of time is mutation.

"Mutation takes place where the things which time has brought into being - habit, tradition, reform, the ideals – are denied. Deny time and mutation has taken place, a total mutation, not the alteration in patterns nor the substitution of one pattern by another", K stated on 26 October.

"Thought is never free, never new; every experience only strengthens the bondage and so there is sorrow. Experience can never free thought; it makes it more cunning, and refinement is not the ending the sorrow."

Thought is mechanical and can therefore never be free. Only in freedom is there no sorrow. The ending of thought is the ending of sorrow.

The next day, a woman walked a few metres ahead of K. The distance between them disappeared and there was only that woman. She was, there was no other.

Otherness is the total destruction of the known; emptiness is a condition for the timeless. It cannot be cultivated or experienced. Experiencing only confirms the known.

On 6 November, K said that meditation is "opening of the door of a furnace whose fire utterly destroys, without leaving any ashes; there are no remains".

A Journey Far Beyond

Two days later, K attended a concert where an eight-stringed instrument was played.

"It was pure sound and on that sound one rode, far and very deep; each sound carried one deeper. The quality of sound that instrument produced made the journey infinite; from the moment he touched it till the moment he stopped, it was the sound that mattered, not the instrument, not the man, not the audience. He must have played for over half an hour and during that entire period the journey, far and deep, continued; it was not a journey that is taken in imagination, on the wings of thought or in the frenzy of emotion."

Beliefs and ideals are unnecessary and dissipate the energy which is needed to understand reality. They are an escape from the fact, and in escape there is no end to sorrow. Sorrow ends when there is a choiceless awareness of a fact.

"Every thought shapes the mind in the mould of the known; every feeling, every emotion, however refined, becomes wasteful and empty and the body fed with thought and feeling loses its sensitivity."

Every thought and feeling must flower for them to live and die. It is only in freedom that anything can flourish.

"To allow envy to flower is not easy; it is condemned or cherished but never given freedom. It is only in freedom the fact of envy reveals its colour, its shape, its peculiarities; if suppressed, it will not reveal itself fully and freely. When it has shown itself completely, there is an ending of it only to reveal another fact, emptiness, loneliness, fear - and as each fact is allowed to flower, in freedom, in its entirety, the conflict between the observer and the observed ceases; there is no longer the censor but only observation, only seeing."

The screen of words acts as a shelter for the lazy, the thoughtless and the deceitful mind.

"Slavery to words is the beginning of inaction which may appear to be action and a mind caught in symbols cannot go far. Every word, thought, shapes the mind and without understanding every thought, mind becomes a slave to words and sorrow begins. Conclusions and explanations do not end sorrow."

Be Nothing, not a Thing

On 22 November, K gave his first talk in Madras and wrote in his diary: "It is strange how far away the world is and into what great depth one has travelled. The telegraph poles, the buses, the bullock carts and the worn-out villagers were there beside you, but you were far away; so deep that no thought could follow; every feeling stayed far away."

He walked, aware of everything that was happening around him: the darkening of the moon, the warning of the cycle bell, but he was far away – not him, there was great, vast depth.

This depth went on more profoundly within itself, past time and the limits of space. Memory could not follow it; memory is tethered, but this was not. It was complete freedom, without root or direction. Deep within, far from thought, there was a bursting energy that was ecstasy.

On 27 November, K wrote: "It is strange, the desire to show off or to be somebody. Envy is hate, and vanity corrupts. It seems so impossibly difficult to be simple, to be what you are and not pretend. To be what you are is in itself arduous enough without trying to become something else, which is not too difficult. If you're even at all intelligent, you give up being anything."

To be nothing, you must unearth and expose all hidden things. In the pure act of seeing, they will wither away. This is not a negative state; denial is the most positive action. It is freedom, giving us energy that we waste in thinking.

Money Can't Buy

"The silence which is desired ceases to be illuminating; if it is the pursuit of visions and experiences, then it leads to illusions and self-hypnosis. Only in the flowering of thought and so ending of thought does meditation have significance; thought can only flower in freedom, not in ever widening patterns of knowledge."

Knowledge shapes and governs experience. A mind that is a light to itself needs no experience. Immaturity is the craving for greater and wider experience. Meditation is wandering through the world of knowledge and being free of it in order to enter the unknown.

The next day, K wondered how important money had become to people. They talk about it, yet also avoid talking about it because it is considered bad behaviour. If you have money, you are considered miserable, and if you don't have it, you are in miserable too. A person's worth is determined by their earnings and position.

The rich and the poor both envy each other, competing to show off their influence, knowledge, clothes and their conversational brilliance. Everyone wants to impress someone. Money is more important than anything else, except power.

The more money and power we have, the more we want. However, behind all the money and power, there is sorrow which cannot be denied. We may put it aside, try to forget about it but it's always there, like a deep wound that nothing seems to heal.

To end sorrow, we need passion, which cannot be bought. It is there when we stop escaping.

Love Has No Motive

On 9 December, K reflected on how we are all driven by various motives.

"Every action has a motive and so we have no love. Nor do we love what we are doing."

Love has no motive; in its absence, all sorts of motives creep in. Living without a motive is not difficult; it requires integrity, not conformity to ideals and beliefs. Having integrity is to be self-critically aware and having a constant awareness of what we are from moment to moment.

This is a natural link to meditation.

"Meditation was the sound of that bird calling out of that emptiness, and the roar of the sea, thundering against the beach. Love can only be in utter emptiness. The greying dawn was there far away on the horizon, and the dark trees were more dark and intense. In meditation there is no repetition, a continuation of habit; there is death of everything known and the flowering of the unknown."

A River Flowing Free

From Madras, K went to Rajghat and saw the river on 18 December.

"It was really a marvellous river: wide, deep, with so many cities on its banks; so carelessly free and never abandoning itself. All life was there upon its banks, green fields, forests, solitary houses, death, love and destruction."

There were long, wide bridges over it, graceful and well-used. Other streams and rivers joined it but she was the mother of all rivers, big and small. She was always full, purifying itself. It was a blessing to watch her, with deepening colour in the clouds and her waters golden.

The next day, K reflected on the nature of beauty.

"Beauty is not man-made; the things of man arouse feelings, sentiment, but these have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty can never be put together, neither the thing built nor in the museum. One must go beyond all this, all personal taste and choice, be cleansed of all emotion, for love is beauty."

The year changed and on the first day K gave his first talk in Rajghat. In the evening, he walked the path and "the miracle of silence lasted nearly half an hour but there was no duration, no time". On returning to his room, otherness welcomed him with open arms.

The following evening, K watched the poor villagers, who appeared oblivious to their own misery and physical weakness. Everyone was cheerful, even the elderly and infirm.

The river running through the village was everything to them. Sometimes calm and sometimes threatening the village, they fished in it, washed in it, laid flowers as a sign of respect and died beside it. The river was indifferent to their joy and sorrow. But the most marvellous thing of all was the sky reflected on the river's surface. The light of the sky was soft, clear and very gentle, thought and feeling had no part in it. You cannot see that light unless you know the timeless movement of meditation.

On 14 January, K gave his final talk in Rajghat, after which he walked a path through the meadows.

Otherness was present with insistency and immensity, filling the sky and the earth, every little thing in it. It accompanied him all day long and was in the room when he entered it.

A Fire that Leaves No Ashes

New Delhi had been freezing, with the poor suffering and dying in the cold. K gave eight talks there, but did not make a note of them in his diary.

There, too, "that unknowable immensity was there, not only in the room and beyond but also deep, in the innermost recesses, which was once the mind".

It left no mark; it is impenetrable and unapproachable; its intensity was fire that left no ash.

"The past and the unknown do not meet at any point. There is no bridge to cross , nor a path that leads to it. The past has to cease for the unknowable, for that immensity to be."

Discipline Dries the Mind

"There is a quietness which is not the opposite of disturbance; in this quietness the mind can travel very far, beyond the measure of time. It's free to travel, there are no hindrances, no barriers, no self-imposed restrictions. All resistance prevents this journeying but resistance and commitments do not bring about this quietness for this is born out of freedom. "

A withered, disciplined mind can never be free. It has lost its youth, its innocence. Freedom is at the beginning, not at the end.

"Time is the space for experiencing and experience only dulls the mind and heart. The mind is filled and the heart has turned away and so there is no seeing."

To see, knowledge must be kept in the books and not in the mind. Knowledge interprets, chooses, giving colour, opinion, weighing and criticising; then there is no seeing.

How can you see when your memory is crowded and your heart is full of sorrow?

When we do see and listen, that act is the miracle that transforms the mind and the heart, that has emptied them of the past. You don't have to do anything. This miracle does not come about through exertion; watching and listening is pure compassion.

"The fire that burns away the past, the structure of time, is the act of seeing. Seeing is complete attention."

Only a mind that is completely empty and free of the known can contain the fact and what is beyond. Meditation is the emptying of the mind of the known, of knowledge. It is the fact, the what is, that frees thought.

When the brain is utterly still, it is sharpened and highly sensitive. We cannot silence it without making it dull. Only being free and attentive it can flower.

The next day, K watched a little boy dressed in red coat. He was there alone, playing under a large tree, walking around it, touching it lightly his eyes closed. Then he started to run towards home, but stopped and waved his hand as a goodbye to his friend. The boy was completely happy near the tree.

Life Is Death

"Life is death; they are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot separate the one from the other. It is there as your shadow, night and day, sleeping or waking. Nothing is permanent, and so your heart says, "let's live for the day", but the day is full of sorrow and shadows. The more superficial you are, the more dead you are but even for you, it is waiting, none can avoid it, do what you will."

Sorrow and love cannot live together. You cannot be free from sorrow unless you are free from time. Sorrow is in the shadow, not in the fact; in what is. Facts have no time, but thoughts about the facts do. Tears or time will not open the door to eternity. You must die without effort and without a cry.

In mid-February, K was in Bombay, where traffic was heavy and only the poor were walking or queuing for buses. He walked its streets and watched the people.

"Meditation is a delight. It is a movement in which everything is for it is nothing; it has no centre and so no beginning but then no ending. You cannot enter into that movement; the you must be left in your office, in your church and temple. You cannot enter into that movement with experience and knowledge. There must be no you."

He had not disappeared, but he had ceased to exist, not just for that morning, but in such a way that it would be extremely difficult to find him again – and it wouldn't be worth the effort.

He was alive, but not living. Living was "a movement without measure, an ecstasy that no thought or feeling could ever capture".

Living is action, not memory. The ashes of memory are not the fire of life. Ideation is made of these ashes. Continuity, permanence is mechanical inaction, kept alive by conflict. Conflict, sorrow, self-pity and memory are the fuel of inaction. Complete living is total action.

Habits Prevent a Timeless Glimpse

On 25 February, K was walking in a wealthy neighbourhood with no pavements. The houses may have been clean, but the roads were filthy. The people were unmindful, used to noise, dirt, sorrow, privation, insults and death.

"Meditation is the destruction of habit; habit is a continuity, that prevents the flash of an eternal moment. It will ever be a flash, a spark of no time and thought cannot make of it a continuity, series of related thought, habit. Meditation is the ending of thought and the beginning of emptiness. There is no resting place in that emptiness, no thought as experience can take root which is the beginning of time. From that emptiness there is love, whose death is the creation."

The next evening, K saw two sisters sitting on the side of a dirty road. The older sister was forcing the little one to sit on her lap, but she preferred to sit on the hard, dirty roadside, with cars, buses and lorries rushing past. This was a common sight for the locals.

A policeman came along and with a gesture and a word asked them to get closer to the wall and they did as they were told. There was the light that revealed the beauty of everything, making no distinction between the beautiful and the ugly.

The street lights came on and the little girls had disappeared. The scent of the mango blossom hung in the air.

The sea was restless and alive. Newly washed saris had been spread out to dry on the shore of the bay. They caught the sunlight, making him forget the world. There was only colour and light upon them.

"Experience is the recognition, the continuity of the known. Meditation is the uprooting of the known. Words, recognition and the known had come to an end and the immeasurable space of the mind moved with its own swiftness that left no mark. It was energy without frontiers."

Everything and Nothing

On 1 March, K was watching a wealthy couple.

"It's strange how little humility there is. A car went by, with a very smart, bejewelled woman inside; she was so terribly conscious of herself, of her hair, dress and of her body. She was patting her hair, adjusting her dress and in a little mirror looking at herself; probably she was going to some party or other. The man beside her seemed so insignificant, so bored, so sloppy. She was everything and he was nothing; she ruled and he followed but probably in the office he was the tyrant. Both of them had that peculiar atmosphere of the rich, of the arrogant."

But on the other hand, though:

"You never saw anything so utterly innocent; she was lying on her back; you could just see the whole delicate line of her and she was almost touching the water; it was a stroke of light of the very young, new moon, appearing for the first time in a cloudless sky. You never saw her before, though you had seen her a thousand times; it was so innocent that you in that crowded noisy street were made innocent. You were innocent, without striving, without thought; everything about you was new, you had never seen them before. Your eyes were washed clean and you had not a spot in your heart; you were so far away that nothing could touch you."

On 18 March, K flew to Rome and wrote the final entry in his diary the next day.

"There was the roar of those jets and it wasn't too noisy, you could hear the conversation of those ladies, seated across the aisle. But there was silence. Amidst all the chatter and roar, it was there as clear and spotless as the blue sky. It was there with such intensity that there was no experiencing it. Out of this silence, suddenly and unexpectedly, there was that immensity. Your whole being became utterly still, without a thought, without a feeling. There was that unapproachable strength. It was the strength that nothing could penetrate and so utterly vulnerable."

The moment K came abroad out of the humid heat of the night, he sat motionless and totally lost for three hours. As the plane landed in Rome, he watched the river and green fields below. The fields were like a human mind: all broken up, divided, the property of each owner. And beyond was the sea, blue, rough and incredibly alive.