No More Learning

In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle
said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But
to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate
achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has
weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and
mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.
Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the son went out to
look for his father's asses, he did not know that a man of God was
waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his own soul
was already the soul of a king.

I hope to live long enough and to produce work of such a character that I
shall be able at the end of my days to say, 'Yes! this is just where the
artistic life leads a man! ' Two of the most perfect lives I have come
across in my own experience are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince
Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed years in prison: the first,
the one Christian poet since Dante; the other, a man with a soul of that
beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia. And for the
last seven or eight months, in spite of a succession of great troubles
reaching me from the outside world almost without intermission, I have
been placed in direct contact with a new spirit working in this prison
through man and things, that has helped me beyond any possibility of
expression in words: so that while for the first year of my imprisonment
I did nothing else, and can remember doing nothing else, but wring my
hands in impotent despair, and say, 'What an ending, what an appalling
ending! ' now I try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not
torturing myself do really and sincerely say, 'What a beginning, what a
wonderful beginning! ' It may really be so. It may become so. If it
does I shall owe much to this new personality that has altered every
man's life in this place.

You may realise it when I say that had I been released last May, as I
tried to be, I would have left this place loathing it and every official
in it with a bitterness of hatred that would have poisoned my life.
I
have had a year longer of imprisonment, but humanity has been in the
prison along with us all, and now when I go out I shall always remember
great kindnesses that I have received here from almost everybody, and on
the day of my release I shall give many thanks to many people, and ask to
be remembered by them in turn.

The prison style is absolutely and entirely wrong. I would give anything
to be able to alter it when I go out. I intend to try. But there is
nothing in the world so wrong but that the spirit of humanity, which is
the spirit of love, the spirit of the Christ who is not in churches, may
make it, if not right, at least possible to be borne without too much
bitterness of heart.

I know also that much is waiting for me outside that is very delightful,
from what St. Francis of Assisi calls 'my brother the wind, and my sister
the rain,' lovely things both of them, down to the shop-windows and
sunsets of great cities. If I made a list of all that still remains to
me, I don't know where I should stop: for, indeed, God made the world
just as much for me as for any one else. Perhaps I may go out with
something that I had not got before. I need not tell you that to me
reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in
theology. But while to propose to be a better man is a piece of
unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those
who have suffered. And such I think I have become.

If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me
to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With
freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?
Besides, feasts are not for me any more.