I Showed that the Gloom Could Also Not Be
I Showed that the Gloom Could Also Not Be
By Joshua Chalifour
Immersed, I search in the
answers and questions,
for just further in me
where science reaches, is
what man sees in a life's direction.
And of his home amid the darkness,
cannot a tree also be a forest?
No, he goes to the sciences
and so
by the wood, sees a home.
Where there is a wood
I myself, abstract
mathematical distance
amid dark horizons.
But in the darkness,
there is no clear exit.
He sees clearly where
and then which, could be.
I wandered there and experienced
his experimental gleams
of the glade
and felt not
but there was a confession
in my human climbs.
And finally I—that went deeper into
lost knowledge—I was convinced
but of that limitless home.
A Confession
By Lev Nikolaevitch Tolstoy (translation: Aylmer Maude) 1
1 Lev Nikolaevitch Tolstoy, “A Confession,” in The Portable Tolstoy, ed. John Bayley, trans. Aylmer Maude (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1978), http://archive.org/details/portabletolstoy00leot.
In my search for answers to life’s questions I experienced just what is felt by a man lost in a forest.
He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the limitless distance, but sees that his home is not and cannot be there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the darkness, but there also his home is not.
So I wandered in that wood of human knowledge, amid the gleams of mathematical and experimental science which showed me clear horizons but in a direction where there could be no home, and also amid the darkness of the abstract sciences where I was immersed in deeper gloom the further I went, and where I finally convinced myself that there was, and could be, no exit.