A Sea Change (The Shadowhunter Chronicles #21.5)

A Sea Change

If after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly.

If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in.

If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me.

But that could not be. I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God’s secret as any one can get.

—Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Nothing of him that doth fade,

into something rich and strange.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest