A friend sent me the following quotation from his favorite poem, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”:
We think of the key, each in his prison,
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
I replied:
It may be beautiful poetry but what does it say that’s of use for people like you and me who pursue liberation? Confirmation of something we know perfectly well is trivial. For us the significance of the key is that it exists and that we are using it.
We can make those lines say something profound by rewriting them like so:
We think of the key, each in one’s own prison,
Thinking of one’s self, each creates a prison
I wrote “thinking of one’s self” not “remaining aware of ourself”. The first is mental activity but the second is direct self-knowing.
The first takes place in darkness, the second is light.
The second is the key.