Letter 996

Wandering after the raid of the barbarians, I came to Pharan [an oasis settlement in the Sinai], and certain people, hearing about me as I passed by, about the eremitic life, said many things among themselves, stringing together praises of it: how it is full of calm and freed from every disturbance, enlarging by its stillness the condition of the soul as it pursues wisdom over the things that are seen; leading it as it advances near to the knowledge of God, which all the wise from the beginning of the age with one voice glorify as the ultimate object of desire and the final blessedness. And while I, with tear-filled eyes, was attending to them fixedly, and conversed in a manner exceedingly full of grief- for I was sitting utterly confounded over the calamities that had befallen, and was still bearing on my face the visible announcement of the disaster- they, perhaps wishing to speak to me, turned aside, stepping away from the straight path; and seating themselves in the middle, after a brief pause, when they saw me silent and groaning, they earnestly and at the same time sympathetically asked the cause of my confusion. And when, still more passionately, I cried out aloud at the question- for the question moved my memory, which had been a little at rest, again toward suffering, and the report of the drama [the events] once more compelled my reasoning to see the affairs as if present, stamping upon the mind those things which experience had handed over to perception- 'What,' they said, 'of the things we have spoken, has grieved you on our account, O elder, as though it were a falsehood, and made you sit lamenting an error of our opinion? Or what longing holds you, akin to our discourse? And do you bewail this, secretly struck in your memory? For the dejection of the grief that ravages you within has cried out no small anguish, offering your tears as the evidence.'