Ever afterward, Hugh MacLennan was to protest his title had been taken out of context. Two Solitudes was a reference to Rainer Maria Rilke's definition of love: ''that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other.'' As such, it is a symbol not of division, but of union.

The issue, then, is not so much whether the Canadian state can be preserved, in whatever attenuated form. It is whether the Canadian nation will live. For the existence of our nation is something more than, or rather independent of, the two solitudes themselves. It is the protecting, the touching, and the greeting. It is the very presence of love.

How unimportant in this light is whether Meech Lake is passed or fails. Granted, Lucien Bouchard's emotional, almost incoherent resignation speech has raised the hysteria level. The accord's hired guns in the media have shrieked a little louder that Quebec will go if the dissenting premiers do not give in. Jeffrey Simpson's Wednesday column in the Globe & Mail (''history will judge'') added the last erratic stroke to a picture of utter, sobbing intellectual collapse.

Skepticism, under the circumstances, seems almost churlish. While the polls show a large percentage of Quebecers in favor of ''sovereignty,'' whatever they interpret that to mean, they also show that, by a margin of 59% to 20%, they would prefer Pierre Trudeau to Brian Mulroney as Prime Minister. Trudeau!   Yesterday's Man!  Mulroney!  Honor and Enthusiasm!  How perverse of these Quebecers not to fall in with the cliches of conventional wisdom.

The bully tactics will likely succeed, all the same. Clyde Wells is now reduced to pleading with the Prime Minister to stand up for the Charest report. It is possible that in his present state - and I do not mean Canada - Bouchard cannot recognize the report leaves Meech Lake intact in most essentials. But Wells cannot fail to be aware of this.

Certainly the committee's restatement of the federal position on the distinct society clause has at least exposed once and for all how contradictory is the interpretation held by Robert Bourassa, though the difference is only in the degree to which they would subvert the Charter. But forgotten in all the fuss over this one clause is the rest of Meech Lake's proposals, unchanged and malevolent as ever.

Canada is still to be defined in terms more appropriate to a linguistic Group Areas Act. The premiers are to nominate Supreme Court justices, with no way to break the deadlock in the event a future separatist government were to put forward the names of Guy Chevrette, Claude Morin and Lucien Bouchard. Quebec is to be given a veto over Senate reform, while no other significant change can be made to the Constitution without the approval of every province.

The federal government must hide its face when immigrants are welcomed to our shores, their numbers constrained to whatever guarantees Quebec's (or any other province's) quota. The first ministers' conferences are to be entrenched as an institution of national government, rather than the extra-parliamentary aberration they are. The spending power clause remains, leaving provinces free to spend federal money on whatever is ''compatible'' with ''the national objectives'' - bearing in mind Quebec's status as a distinct society. It is comment enough that this is the least offensive item in the document.

Oh yes, the Charest committee tosses a few things the native peoples' way. And it boldly recognizes the right of the Canadian government to promote the two official languages of Canada - though Bourassa has rejected even this out of hand. But nothing changes the accord's central theme: the emasculation of federal power - not in favor of the people, but of the premiers.

Keep this in mind. The Meech Lake Accord is not ''flawed, or ''imperfect,'' as its proponents like to admit. It is a disaster, from top to bottom. In every respect, from its original justification - that Quebec was ''excluded'' in 1981 - to its drafting, to its contents, and its defence, it is immersed in and encourages the belief that the only legitimate representatives of the people of Canada are the provincial premiers.

Not their federal Members of Parliament, who voted overwhelmingly for the 1982 constitutional amendments. And not the people themselves, who have made equally clear their rejection of the 1987 exercise. As a document, the accord is, as one commentator has put it, an ''abject denial of nationhood.'' As a symbol, it has succeeded only in driving a wedge between the two solitudes.

We will get Meech Lake, in one form or another. I do not think this will preserve the Canadian state: both Jacques Parizeau and Bourassa have stated plainly they will use the accord to increase Quebec's autonomy by stages. But I know, whether it does or not, it has destroyed the Canadian nation.