The problem with science, Tolstoy said, is that it can’t tell us how to live. Only: this is the problem with everything. Nothing can be explained; nothing worth having, at any rate. Of course the world yields to inquiry; of course the sky can be pondered and the paths of planets followed with symbols and lines; of course money can be explained and counted and transferred; of course books can be written and read and sold and music written for movement or for hearing; and there is nothing unholy in such things, for God must be thinking on the bones of the world for us to see it: thus to think and know is to follow God’s thoughts.

But the world does not yield to explanation, only to touch. Once you cease to touch: once you think without touching, know without acting, possess without earning well it all turns to so much steam and trickery and you find yourself in padded rooms and prisons staring out windows of trains at sunsets dreaming of past and future and the old tired earth spinning faster than you can ever move.

And so it must be to this whole exhausted body of civilization, this monster whose nerves have spread by wire and road and wireless sattellite, who knows at all times the source and type of any pain within its body, who knows where its limbs are: who can no longer feel anything bigger than itself and is slowly slowly going mad from a sort of sensory deprivation. Its paintings are self-absorbed, its books written to no one in particular, its powerless gods expressible in the insular terminology of money and power and social structure.

The insuff’rable pride out of which I utter poems. O god we should all just shut up and make no noise for a little while or forget at least that we have spoken and that everything has been said and that gold stands for this and fish for thus and that wine has already been drunk so often that even the blood of God is exhausted. O for sleep.