other · 387 · Ostia
They were leaning on a window looking over a garden in the house at Ostia, waiting for a sailing, and talking about what the eternal life of the saints could be like. He describes them climbing by degrees past all bodily things, past the sun and moon and stars, past their own minds, until for one beat of the heart they touched it — and then fell back into the noise of speech, where a word begins and ends. She said afterwards that there was nothing left she wanted in this world, that her one reason for wishing to stay had been to see him a Catholic Christian before she died, and that God had given her that in overflowing measure. She was ill five days later and dead in nine, at fifty-six, and was buried at Ostia rather than beside her husband in Africa as she had always wanted — which she said, when they asked, no longer mattered, because nothing is far from God. He was thirty-three and the grief in the ninth book is the least composed writing he ever did.
Nothing planned — they were waiting at the port for a ship back to Africa.
The one passage in ancient literature where two people reason their way to the edge of the mystical together, and the death of the woman this page is about.