CALCUTTA: A beggar, half-conscious, is lying on a mat in a home for the dying. A nun is kneeling by his side, her delicate fingers wiping his forehead with a washcloth. She is a peasant whose eyes shine like the wings of a heron flying around the sun, a silence whose light soars through the darkness.

How can I describe the beggar's eyes as he summons all his strength to motion her to draw close? She obeys.

It takes the beggar a long time to whisper something in her ears: "I have lived . . . like an animal. Now I will die . . . like an angel." The beggar's final words.

SILENCE: an energy which extends beyond the furthest reaches of the universe — and never vanishes, a quiet which pervades every particle of this world, and glides through the blackness of the great harbor by night, and speaks differently by day. Speech is the body of silence: the word floats up from silence; it flows back into silence. The word of relationship and the quiet of the heart are inseparable — like love and the silence from which it is born, and the rest to which it returns, unceasingly.