On the futility of storming the middle of things, and the quieter art of becoming one.
There is a certain kind of ambitious man who discovers something true inside himself and at once carries it, like a lit torch, straight down the nave of the cathedral. He is then astonished to find the cathedral made of stone.
Consider the elements, which have been in this argument far longer than generals.
The centre is rock. Rock does not argue. It has no need to. Throw yourself against it with real conviction and the rock will record the event the way a cliff records a seagull: politely, and not at all.
The challenger, as a rule, comes as fire, the most beautiful element and the least patient. Fire is magnificent in its first minute and a smudge by its hundredth, because it needs fuel and the centre declines to be fuel. Worse still, fire throws light, and the light of a frontal attack falls most flatteringly on the very walls it means to burn. There has never been a finer advertisement for a fortress than a man blazing heroically at its base. The townspeople come out with folding chairs. Children are lifted onto shoulders. The fortress has seldom looked so well.
Water is the element the general admired, and with good reason. Water does not attack the mountain. It goes around. Ten thousand years later it is found to have carved a canyon, and it is thanked for the view by coachloads of tourists who never once think to pity the mountain. Water's genius is not force. It is a magnificent indifference to the obstacle. Water takes the shape of the ground, the general observed, and so it is never defeated by the ground, because it never consents to fight it.
But beneath rock, fire and water lies the older law, the one the planets obey without being asked: gravity. The centre is the centre not because of its walls but because of its mass. Things fall toward it: money, gossip, marriages, invitations, the attention of the young, the loyalty of the old. This is the fact the visionary most often ignores. He has an inner reality, rich, vivid and furnished down to the curtains, and he wants it carried out into the world. But the world's weight sits elsewhere, and trying to project a vision into a field whose gravity bends the other way is like pouring claret uphill. One cannot fight the moonlight. The moon lifts every ocean on earth twice a day and has never once raised its voice.
Then comes time, with its patient indignity of waiting. The old centre is never defeated. It is outgrown, which it finds far more humiliating, since defeat at least comes with a ballad. One morning the court notices that the visitors have stopped calling. The merchants have rerouted their caravans. The bishop now dines elsewhere. Even the moon seems to be keeping new company. There was no battle and no surrender, nothing for the tapestry makers to work with. There was only a quiet change in where things fall.
This is why it was never a fight at all. The great conquerors are remembered for their battles. The great centres are remembered for never having needed any. Rome did not besiege the world. The world simply found, over some centuries and to its considerable surprise, that all its roads had come to lead there.
