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“What’s the most beautiful thing in the world?”
Two young women idled on the rocky shore of a northeastern island near day’s end. The one who spoke stood watching the horizon. She was pale, her hair dull and dry and shorn short where it was not falling out in patches. One hand clutched nervously at her lightly soot-dusted white robes. The four hundred foot-long snake which had flown her over yawned the kind of yawn that could swallow ships.
“Is it a crab?”
The other girl crouched by the waterline, poking the underside of one which had fallen on its back. The crab’s legs tugged at her finger. She watched its eyes squirm and its little mandibles clutch at nothing, her preternaturally perfect face impassive and not quite covered by her sleek, dark hair.
“I had thought it might be the World itself,” the first girl continued, ignoring her friend, and the crab, and the snake. “That is to say, Existence as such. Or, perhaps, its Meaning.”
“Those are completely different things. The last two aren’t even real.” She pulled her finger back from the crab’s claws and leant her cheek on it. “Maybe the first one isn’t either.”
“Perhaps they are not different at all. Not from each other, nor the Mind which beholds them.”
“Now you’re mixing things up on purpose.”
“Or getting at their Essence. At that which shines equally through the child’s smile and the savannah’s vistas and all our hopes.”
“I thought the very nature of a beautiful thing lay in its particularity. In its being completely unique and radically other. In how it brings us out of ourselves and our preoccupations and our self-importance – not how it sucks us back into our own navel.”
The first girl did not quite frown, but the effort showed through her patience.
“What do you find most beautiful then, Satya?”
The dark-haired girl of almost disturbing beauty stood up and wiped her hands on her immaculate white robes of identical cut. As if in afterthought, she brushed the crab with the side of her foot, flipping it over. It scurried away for a few feet, but immediately turned back to her again, legs clicking and mandibles writhing. She did not answer her directly.
“You’re the one who dragged me out of training, Chrys, and onto this pointless little outing.” Satya kicked at a sharp, rocky outcrop. It parted for her foot and reformed behind it like the ocean’s waves. “And now you torment me with random questions.”
Chrys smiled and held out her hand. Satya circled round, pretending to pout, before she sidled over, crouched down, and leant her head against her friend’s leg. Eventually, she hooked two fingers into Chrys’ hand, like a toddler with her mother. Chrys smiled more widely, and more sadly.
The two of them settled into silence as the sun set the sky alight and sunk into the sea. The winged snake grinned widely, rejoicing that the Great Ancestor Apep had once again succeeded in swallowing the day, and enjoying the slight sluggishness brought on by this northern chill.
Bound, as they were, in the flow of time, the girls did not know it was this very question which had first fired up their Master to leave the home life, shouting “If once in ten thousand ages, a great sage were to find the answer, it would have happened as though between morning and evening!” Nor did they know by what twisted byways it would lead him to a death in sorrow – for they did not even suspect whose hallowed and shameful name would be the last word on his lips.
They could not see how much of the beauty lay in the longing, nor how much strain survived the search. They had not looked upon the faces of all the many people who would be caught up in their wake. They could not tell if the tide would bear them toward the further shore or bring them back, ceaseless, to crash against the rocks of this one moment.
But they knew very well which one of them would die this winter, though they did not speak of it. And one of them had glimpsed her answer here, though she did not know if it was in the sun or in the sky or overheard in wind or in the letting go or the acceptance – nor, in truth, why she sought it. So when the night had finished falling, she had forgotten even that.
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David Leon 