He has no secret from them. This knowledge

Of them and of himself destroys both worlds,

Except when he escapes from it. To be

Alone is not to know them or himself.

This creates a third world without knowledge,

In which no one peers, in which the will makes no

Demands. It accepts whatever is as true,

Including pain, which, otherwise, is false.

In the third world, then, there is no pain. Yes, but

What lover has one in such rocks, what woman,

However known, at the centre of the heart?

XIII

It may be that one life is a punishment

For another, as the son’s life for the father’s.

But that concerns the secondary characters.

It is a fragmentary tragedy

Within the universal whole. The son

And the father alike and equally are spent,

Each one, by the necessity of being

Himself, the unalterable necessity

Of being this unalterable animal.

This force of nature in action is the major

Tragedy. This is destiny unperplexed,

The happiest enemy. And it may be

That in his Mediterranean cloister a man,

Reclining, eased of desire, establishes

The visible, a zone of blue and orange

Versicolorings, establishes a time

To watch the fire-feinting sea and calls it good,

The ultimate good, sure of a reality

Of the longest meditation, the maximum,

The assassin’s scene. Evil in evil is

Comparative. The assassin discloses himself,

The force that destroys us is disclosed, within

This maximum, an adventure to be endured

With the politest helplessness. Ay-mi!

One feels its action moving in the blood.

XIII

Victor Serge said, “I followed his argument

With the blank uneasiness which one might feel

In the presence of a logical lunatic.”

He said it of Konstantinov. Revolution

Is the affair of logical lunatics.

The politics of emotion must appear

To be an intellectual structure. The cause

Creates a logic not to be distinguished

From lunacy … One wants to be able to walk

By the lake at Geneva and consider logic:

To think of the logicians in their graves

And of the worlds of logic in their great tombs.

Lakes are more reasonable than oceans. Hence,

A promenade amid the grandeurs of the mind,

By a lake, with clouds like lights among great tombs,

Gives one a blank uneasiness, as if

One might meet Konstantinov, who would interrupt

With his lunacy. He would not be aware of the lake.

He would be the lunatic of one idea

In a world of ideas, who would have all the people

Live, work, suffer and die in that idea

In a world of ideas. He would not be aware of the clouds,

Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire.

His extreme of logic would be illogical.

XV

The greatest poverty is not to live

In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire

Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,

After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,

Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe

The green corn gleaming and experience

The minor of what we feel. The adventurer