When we emerged from the earth, not only were we given a unique inner well, but we were also given a mirror in our minds. This mirror is fractured, but it enables us to think about every thing. Our thoughts can gather and ask themselves questions and probe mysteries until some new light is quarried. Because you are human, you are privileged and burdened with the task of knowing. Our desire to know is the deepest longing of the soul; it is a call to intimacy and belonging. We are always in a state of knowing, even when we do not realize it. Though the most subtle minds in the Western tradition have attempted to understand what it is that happens when we know something, no one has succeeded in explaining how we know. When we know something, we come into relationship with it. All our knowing is an attempt to transfigure the unknown—to complete the journey from anonymity to intimacy. Since each one of us lives behind the intimacy of a countenance, we long to put a personal countenance on our experiences. When we know what has happened to us, we will come closer to ourselves and learn more about who we are. Yet the world is not our mirror image. Knowledge, including the knowledge we have of each other, does not abolish the strangeness. True knowledge makes us aware of the numinous and awakens desire.
Aristotle said in the first sentence of his Metaphysics, “All men by nature desire to know.” This is the secret magic and danger of having a mind. Even though your body is always bound to one place, your mind is a relentless voyager. The mind has a magnificent, creative restlessness that always brings it on a new journey. Even in the most sensible and controlled lives there is often an undertow of longing that would deliver them to distant shores. There is something within you that is not content to remain fixed within any one frame. You cannot immunize yourself against your longing. You love to reach beyond, to discover something new. Knowing calls you out of yourself. Discovery delights the heart. This is the natural joy of childhood and the earned joy of the artist. The child and the artist are pilgrims of discovery. When you limit your life to the one frame of thinking, you close out the mystery. When you fence in the desires of your heart within fixed walls of belief, morality, and convention, you dishonour the call to discovery. You create grey fields of “quiet desperation.” Discovery is the nature of the soul. There is some wildness of divinity in us, calling us to live everything. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh said, “To be dead is to stop believing in / The masterpieces we will begin tomorrow.”