The Poetry of Though is My Choice
The Poetry of Thought by George Steiner
The air in the high-ceilinged, timeless library hummed with the soft energy of countless thoughts. Sophia, her eyes reflecting the calm blue of a distant, starless ocean, stood at a massive mahogany table. Across from her, a man with a stern, focused intensity—Ezra—gestured with a quill, the ink still wet on the parchment before him.
Sophia: You speak, Ezra, of a singular, profound kind of understanding. Not the mere cataloging of words, but something earned. A book, to you, is not a window to be looked through, but a door that demands passage.
Ezra: Precisely. The words are only blueprints. A man can study the finest drawings of a bridge for a hundred years and still not know the true shape of it until he has felt the vibration of traffic beneath his feet or watched the river swell against the pilings. You must live the tension; you must feel the weight of the ideas. To say one understands a tale of grief without having felt a true absence is an empty boast. The printed page offers the opportunity, but the self provides the anvil where the true meaning is forged.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
— Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Sophia: Then the deepest understanding is always an act of autobiography. The work becomes whole only when the reader lends it their own life's experience as a mirror. The thought within the lines, which your friend George called poetry, requires the hum of lived experience to truly resonate. It is not just about decoding the message, but about its fusion with one's own history.
Ezra: A most concise way to put it, Sophia. The poet only provides the seed; the reader must provide the soil. Without that fertile, personal ground, the seed remains dormant, nothing more than a potentiality on the page.
Sophia: And yet, I wonder, if we must wait for life to teach us every line, does that not risk rendering wisdom forever out of reach for the young?
Ezra: No. It means that the deepest book is a companion for a lifetime. A young man reads it and grasps the shape of a house; an old man reads it and knows the texture of the wood and the draft beneath the door. The initial reading is an illumination; the later readings are a revelation. Every scar we earn is a new lens through which the page reveals another, deeper truth.
Do you believe, then, that there is a difference between knowing about an idea and knowing it in your very bones?
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Heraclitus
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