Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.

The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous: it is a capital Like Rome, ruined and eternal, Marked by the monument which no one Now remembers.

That inescapable animal walks with me. Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.

Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?

As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely flung.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion.

Let us honor if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one.

The longest journey Is the journey inwards Of him who has chosen his destiny.

How should I know what I’ll be, I who don’t know what I am? Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can’t all be it! Genius? At this moment A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me, And it may be that history won’t remember even one, All their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Human kind cannot bear very much reality. 6

They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer. They know and do not know, that acting is suffering.

Yet we have gone on living, Living and partly living.

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities.

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.