My ancestors and, yes, the ancestors of some of you, or of most of you, who speak the English tongue, came from the same part of the world, thousands of years ago. Was it from the Caucasus or the North Pole, one is not certain yet. They spoke a language close to my own language, and close to your language. There is in America a remarkable dictionary called the Heritage Dictionary. It gives you almost a hundred pages (at the very end) of the Indo-European roots of many of our words. Most of you are of European origin. At least your thinking has been conditioned by European thought. There’s thus a common way of thinking, an Indo-European way of thinking, between us, so that we are not so far from each other as we often think we are. And beyond the Indo-European way of thinking, in Asia, Africa, Polynesia, is that same human light, by which all words become meaning. Finally, there’s only one meaning, not for every word, but for all words where the word, any word, from any language, dissolves into knowledge. It’s only there at the dissolution of the sound of the word, or of the image of the word, that you say, you understand. And here there’s neither you nor I. That is what I have been trying to achieve. That I become no one, that no one shine but It.

Many good things have been said by distinguished speakers—about me—this evening. But I want to say to you in utter honesty: I would like to be completely nameless, and just be that reality which is beyond all of us who hear me—that reality which evokes in me you, and I in each one listening to me this evening, that there be no one there but light. And it is of that reality the sages have spoken. The sage is One, someone beyond the saint. He is no one. He’s the real seer. In fact, we are all sages, but we don’t recognize it. That is what the Indian tradition says. In the act of seeing—that is, of the seer, the seen, and the seeing—in seeing alone is there pure light. Where does this come from, nobody can name.

I once asked Dr Oppenheimer, the scientist, who told me his hands were soiled by the atom bomb: Have you ever seen an object? And he made answer: Never. If a scientist like Dr Oppenheimer said he has never seen an object—that is of seeing the unseeable, as the seen—it is that level of knowledge I would like desperately to reach, from where I could truly write. It is to that root of writing I pay homage. The Neustadt Prize is thus not given to me, but to That which is far beyond me, but in me—because I alone know I am incapable of writing what people say I have written.

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