And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water
and I feel its taste.
These scents of grass and stars at night, certain
evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall I negate this world whose power and
strength I feel?
Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure
me that this world is mine.
You describe it to me and you teach me to classify
it.
You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are
true.
You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases.
At the final stage
you teach me that this wondrous and multicoloured universe can be reduced to
the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron.
All this is
good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary
system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus.
You explain this world to
me with an image.
I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall
never know. Have I the time to become indignant?
You have already changed
theories.
So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a
hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in
a work of art.
What need had I of so many efforts?
The soft lines of these
hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.
I have
returned to my beginning.
I realize that if through science I can seize
phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.
Were
I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more.
And
you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me
nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach but that are not sure.
A
stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates
itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace
only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps
into walls that defy its assaults?
To will is to stir up paradoxes.
Everything
is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by
thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations
ps/smoh
