The right to be.” Guiding his boat

Under the middle stars, he said:

I

“If knowledge and the thing known are one

So that to know a man is to be

That man, to know a place is to be

That place, and it seems to come to that;

And if to know one man is to know all

And if one’s sense of a single spot

Is what one knows of the universe,

Then knowledge is the only life,

The only sun of the only day,

The only access to true ease,

The deep comfort of the world and fate.

II

There is a human loneliness,

A part of space and solitude,

In which knowledge cannot be denied,

In which nothing of knowledge fails,

The luminous companion, the hand,

The fortifying arm, the profound

Response, the completely answering voice,

That which is more than anything else

The right within us and about us,

Joined, the triumphant vigor, felt,

The inner direction on which we depend,

That which keeps us the little that we are,

The aid of greatness to be and the force.

III

This is the true creator, the waver

Waving purpling wands, the thinker

Thinking gold thoughts in a golden mind,

Loftily jingled, radiant,

The joy of meaning in design

Wrenched out of chaos … The quiet lamp

For this creator is a lamp

Enlarging like a nocturnal ray

The space in which it stands, the shine

Of darkness, creating from nothingness

Such black constructions, such public shapes

And murky masonry, one wonders

At the finger that brushes this aside

Gigantic in everything but size.

IV

The unnamed creator of an unknown sphere,

Unknown as yet, unknowable,

Uncertain certainty, Apollo

Imagined among the indigenes

And Eden conceived on Morningside,

The centre of the self, the self

Of the future, of future man

And future place, when these are known,

A freedom at last from the mystical,

The beginning of a final order,

The order of man’s right to be

As he is, the discipline of his scope

Observed as an absolute, himself.

V

A longer, deeper breath sustains

The eloquence of right, since knowing

And being are one: the right to know

And the right to be are one. We come

To knowledge when we come to life.

Yet always there is another life,

A life beyond this present knowing,

A life lighter than this present splendor,

Brighter, perfected and distant away,

Not to be reached but to be known,

Not an attainment of the will

But something illogically received,

A divination, a letting down

From loftiness, misgivings dazzlingly

Resolved in dazzling discovery.

There is no map of paradise.

The great Omnium descends on us

As a free race. We know it, one

By one, in the right of all. Each man

Is an approach to the vigilance

In which the litter of truths becomes

A whole, the day on which the last star

Has been counted, the genealogy

Of gods and men destroyed, the right

To know established as the right to be.