Both became to some degree enlightened, to some degree fell into the error of confusing their chosen good with power-magically strong, fatally corrupting. In The Sea, The Sea she tells us that there were once two cousins who grew up each in his own way to pursue the good-baffled, but with some intuition of its nature: a saint and a sinner, one to pursue it through religion and the other through art. “The good, Plato says, is what ‘every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does all that it does, with some intuition of its nature, and yet also baffled.’ Iris Murdoch has quoted this elsewhere in a discussion of art, how it may transcend illusion and fantasy and participate in the detachment of pure goodness. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth.
And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among these billions and billions of merging golden lights.
As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky.
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