Think back now to the previous winter, when Mitzi’s second retina slipped and she lost the last vestige of sight. She was always a rather detached and withdrawn sort of girl; and the shock of this total blindness at seventeen was bound to turn her in even more on herself, or on God—and that prime distinction no longer was easy to draw, now the strain of bearing what couldn’t be borne had snapped like an overtaut wire. For now, when she probed to her own very innermost pinpoint “I am,” it was like looking into a tiny familiar room through a window and finding herself instead looking out—upon landscapes of infinite width: no longer her little “I am” inside there at all, but only His great “I AM.” The times when a separate “Mitzi” still seemed to exist were no more than a lingering nightmare she hoped to be rid of for ever as soon as she woke up after His likeness, a nun: no longer her little “I will” there ever again, but only His WORD.
