Raja, I wish I knew
 the cause of that malady.

 For years I could not accept
 the place I was in.
 I felt I should be somewhere else.

 A city, trees, human voices
 lacked the quality of presence.
 I would live by the hope of moving on.

 Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,
 of real trees and voices and friendship and love.

 Link, if you wish, my peculiar case
 (on the border of schizophrenia)
 to the messianic hope
 of my civilization.

 Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,
 in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of
corruption.
 Building in my mind a permanent polis
 forever deprived of aimless bustle.

 I learned at last to say: this is my home,
 here, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets,
 on the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,
 in a great republic, moderately corrupt.

 Raja, this did not cure me
 of my guilt and shame.
 A shame of failing to be
 what I should have been.

 The image of myself
 grows gigantic on the wall
 and against it
 my miserable shadow.

 That's how I came to believe
 in Original Sin
 which is nothing but the first
 victory of the ego.

 Tormented by my ego, deluded by it
 I give you, as you see, a ready argument.

 I hear you saying that liberation is possible
 and that Socratic wisdom
 is identical with your guru's.

 No, Raja, I must start from what I am.
 I am those monsters which visit my dreams
 and reveal to me my hidden essence.

 If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever
 that man is a healthy creature.

 Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness
 had to make our agony only more acute.

 We needed God loving us in our weakness
 and not in the glory of beatitude.

 No help, Raja, my part is agony,
 struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,
 prayer for the Kingdom
 and reading Pascal.