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“And after a long interval he said, ‘I want you I want youin the world’
“For a moment I doubted what I’d heard It struck me as unbelievable And I was hopelessly disarether expanded and obliterated every other consideration in my mind
“ ‘I said that I want you I want youin the world,’ he repeated, with only a subtle change of expression And then he sat waiting, watching His face was as tranquil as always, his smooth, white forehead beneath the shock of his auburn hair without a trace of care, his large eyes reflecting on me, his lips still
“ ‘You want this of s you want to know, and you don’t ask You see Claudia slipping away from you, yet you seem powerless to prevent it, and then you would hasten it, and yet you do nothing!
“ ‘I don’t understand s Perhaps they are clearer to you than they are to me…’
“ ‘You don’t begin to knohat a mystery you are!’ he said
“ ‘But at least you know yourself thoroughly I can’t claim that,’ I said ‘I love her, yet I am not close to her I mean that when I a of her, nothing of anyone’
“ ‘She’s an era for you, an era of your life If and when you break with her, you break with the only one alive who has shared that time with you You fear that, the isolation of it, the burden, the scope of eternal life’
“ ‘Yes, that’s true, but that’s only a small part of it The era, it doesn’tOther va of a hundred eras’
“ ‘But they don’t survive it,’ he said ‘The world would be choked with vampires if they survived it How do you think I come to be the eldest here or anywhere?’ he asked
“I thought about this And then I ventured, ‘They die by violence?’
“ ‘No, almost never It isn’t necessary How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the in with For in beco immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriagesof the cut which suited their pri in the manner they have always understood and valued When, in fact, all things change except the va except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this iures and forible and without value One evening a vampire rises and realizes what he has feared perhaps for decades, that he simply wants no more of life at any cost That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to hi re And that vaoes out to die No one will find his reone And often no one around him — should he still seek the company of other vampires — no one will know that he is in despair He will have ceased long ago to speak of hi He will vanish’
“I sat back impressed by the obvious truth of it, and yet at the saainst that prospect I became aware of the depth of s were from the alienation that he described, how very different froeous and repulsive in that despair suddenly I couldn’t accept it
“ ‘But you wouldn’t allow such a state of‘If there weren’t one single work of art left in this world… and there are thousands… if there weren’t a single natural beauty… if the world were reduced to one eile candle, I can’t help but see you studying that candle, absorbed in the flicker of its light, the change of its colors… how long could that sustain you… what possibilities would it create? A? Am I such a crazed idealist?’
“ ‘No,’ he said There was a brief smile on his lips, an evanescent flush of pleasure But then he went on siation to a world you love because that world for you is still intact It is conceivable your own sensitivity ht become the instrument of madness You speak of works of art and natural beauty I wish I had the artist’s power to bring alive for you the Venice of the fifteenth century, my master’s palace there, the love I felt for him when I was a mortal boy, and the love he felt for me when he made me a vampire Oh, if I could make those times come alive for either you or me… for only an instant! What would that be worth? And what a sadness it is to me that time doesn’t dim the memory of that period, that it becoht of the world I see today’