After a visit to the impressive library at St Gallen in Switzerland, one of the most famous monastic libraries in the world, I walk into the St Gallen Cathedral. The cathedral is so opulent, so gilded; I realise I can’t stand Baroque architecture.

I light a candle and try to pray. I don’t know how. I can’t find spiritual feeling inside myself.

I remember something Cioran wrote in his notebooks, after a visit from an orthodox poet: What right have you to pray for me? I need no intercessor, I shall manage alone. The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else’s, not even a saint’s. I cannot bear you bothering about my salvation. If I apprehend salvation and flee it, your prayers are merely an indiscretion.

Sitting there in the pews, however, I feel the beginning of an understanding. I’m attentive, afraid the thought will escape me: it’s about letting go of any hope – of expectation. I relax when the understanding settles into me. I’ve understood this before, but it takes many understandings of the same truth for it to imprint itself on me.

I’ve grown shy of making notes of the things I understand with my head. It’s what I understand with my heart I ought to write about. But I’m a woman of my time, a modern woman. I arrive at simple truths by complicated means, through reason. And for the truths of the head to become trustworthy, it takes experience and time – or loss. Only the truths of the heart are steady, and dialectics are powerless to destroy them. Maybe understanding is the wrong word for it, as these truths often defy comprehension; they just are.

Understanding without hope – what an odd thing to strive for!

*

There’s a word stuck in my throat. It refuses to go away. I cannot swallow it. I cannot spit it out. It’s hanging on the epiglottis with all its syllables.

It used to belong to an important thought that got itself expressed into words. Its destiny was fulfilled. But the original thought got lost, taking all the other words with it. Except this one. It’s stuck in my throat now, stunned, unable to go back into my vocabulary. On it is the ghost of the thought it can’t remember. This stubborn word is waiting for that lost thought to come back, to validate its reason for being. I admire its fortitude. So much faith. So much faith in a presentiment, a hope. You could almost say that this word has found God.

*

Expectation is attached to selfishness. You feel you are owed something. Hope that is fashioned out of expectation is a vulgar hope. Rancor, jealousy, pettiness, and cowardice spring from it.

The hope within the unnutterable word – the word that is stuck in my throat – has no expectation. It’s purer, it has no ulterior motives. It makes no rational sense.

They’re stages of the same thing. Letting go and trusting in that which we don’t understand. An irrational trust as opposed to an irrational fear. I hardly manage it, if ever, but sometimes I glimpse that trust. There’s so much freedom in it.

*

I’m just back from Finland. I have forgotten most of what happened already, except for the little town of Savonlinna. I liked it there.

I loved the stories I was told about cross-country skiing at night on the frozen lake. About how bright the stars are in the winter. About mushroom picking in the woods in the autumn. It made me think of my own childhood, picking mushrooms or berries in the woods.

I tried to visit the Savonlinna castle. It was dark when I arrived there, it was raining and the castle was closed. I walked back and forth on the bridge, hypnotised by the dark water and the moon. It was quiet; the only noise was the rain. I stood for a long time, incapable of thought and unwilling to break the spell of beauty. But I couldn’t hold on to it. The beauty didn’t go anywhere, but I had to – I was getting soaked.

Beautiful sights, smells and gestures come into being and disappear in an instant. The memory of beauty lasts longer than beauty itself.

*

If there’s something of myself that survives after death; it can’t be the part that I regard as I. Everything that survives after death must have existed before birth. Or before birth there was no me. If anything survives, it must have existed already. It’s something eternal. But also impersonal. I’m too attached to my ego to be comforted by thoughts of an impersonal eternity.

Gabriela Ailenei lives in Dublin