That's how I'll portray you

This is my 100th post, a very special one for me. I present here an excerpt from 'Doctor Zhivago' by Boris Pasternak, a novel very close to my heart. Zhivago, the protagonist, who is also a poet, writes this for his beloved, Lara.

"I’ll stay with you a little, my unforgettable delight, for as long as my arms and my hands and my lips remember you. I’ll put my grief for you in a work that will endure and be worthy of you. I’ll write your memory into an image of aching tenderness and sorrow. I’ll stay here till this is done, then I too will go. This is how I’ll portray you. I’ll trace your features on paper as the sea, after a fearful storm has churned it up, traces the form of the greatest, farthest-reaching wave on the sand. Seaweed, shells, cork, pebble, the lightest, the most imponderable things that it could lift from its bed, are cast up in a broken, sinuous line on the sand. This line endlessly stretching into the distance in the frontier of the highest tide. That was how life’s storm cast you up on my shore, O my pride, that is how I’ll portray you."