from ‘Poetry [compared with intellectual] Knowledge‘..(1944)… by Aimé Césaire….
There is, in Aldous Huxley’s essay, Do What you Will, an amusing page: ‘We think we know everything there is to know about a lion. A lion is the color of the desert, with mane and claws and an expression like Garibaldi’s. But there are also, close by, in Africa, antelope and zebra and as a consequence, indirectly, all the grass that is there… If there were no antelope and zebra, there would be no lion. When the amount of game becomes minimal, the king of the animals becomes thin, and is starved. If the game disappears completely, it dies.
It is the same for Knowledge. Scientific knowledge is a lion without antelope or zebra. In itself it is eaten away. Eaten away by hunger: a hunger to feel something, hunger for life.
And so, unsatisfied, a man looks elsewhere for salvation, which is here a certain sense of completeness.
And little by little, man has realized that along with this half-starved Scientific Knowledge, there is another sort of Knowledge. A Knowledge that grips one entirely.