When the king of Wu sent Confucius into exile, many disciples followed the philosopher, but in later years one of them said he wished he could see his home again. “How is it far,” Confucius asked, “if you can think of it?” 

Those words ran through Ezra Pound’s mind in the death-cells at Pisa, where he watched a man hanged every morning and waited to learn if he, too, would be sentenced to death. The words of Confucius appear, both in Chinese and English, in The Pisan Cantos, which Pound wrote in those horrible months, usually associated with the images of the diamond that is not destroyed in the avalanche and the “rose in the steel-dust,” the visible form created by an invisible magnetic field. 

How is it far, if you can think of it? 

–Robert Anton Wilson,
Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati