But with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those
dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose
desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are
going. They can't know. 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