We have knowledge and what good has it been?

We read and wrote of meaning: God, love, courage in war; and believed none of it. And now time comes for us and asks for explanations, which we supply as students in an examination and not as those who have learned what it is to live by taking the mainsheet, the reins, the handle of a plow or the shaft of a spear. We know these things, of course, but as weekend hobbies, as trips overseas, as introspective metaphors. And the language of our answers betrays us as knowing nothing: as knowing only in the subjunctive, the present perfect, in gerunds and participles. We have been without being; we have gone and did not go. We have had love and did not love. Our answers are strictly true–it is hard to lie to time–but they are truths by definition, denotives and signifiers that may well have no meaning.