Mysterious longing

And then I returned to the hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those masterpieces which, one imagines, one will be better able to "take in" when one has looked away for a moment at something else; but in vain did I make a screen with my hands, the better to concentrate upon the flowers, the feeling they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free itself, to float across and become one with them. They themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing.


The man's on a roll. This is right on the heels of the last entry, and he's still trying to unpack the unearthly allure of those hawthorns. This passage may nearly serve as a microcosm of the entire 4,200-some-odd-page affair: the narrator observing, lacking quite the words to describe but trying (at great length) anyway, intermittently focusing on small episodes, but no, everything still floats away in a wordy blur of emotion, and he (and we) are left, in the end, with nothing more (or less) than Mysterious Longing.