Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden turns the modernist crisis of meaning into a psychological riddle: the center is missing, yet somehow already mapped. The line reads like a confession from someone exhausted by conscious striving. “The center” evokes more than personal balance; it’s the old promise of a stable moral or metaphysical anchor that 20th-century life (war, ideology, mass society) kept shaking loose. Auden doesn’t romanticize that loss. He makes it feel like a practical problem - a thing you go looking for and can’t locate, the way you lose your keys while they’re in your pocket.

The clever twist is the second clause: what the speaker can’t find, the unconscious “knows.” That’s not a comforting mysticism; it’s a reminder that the self is divided, and the part running the show isn’t the one doing the narrating. Auden is flirting with Freud here, but with a poet’s skepticism: the unconscious becomes both oracle and saboteur, a storehouse of buried conviction, fear, desire, and half-remembered faith. The syntax itself performs the split - “I” versus “my unconscious mind” - as if the speaker has to cite an internal authority because personal agency no longer feels reliable.

Context matters: Auden wrote in an era when traditional centers (religion, empire, inherited social scripts) were collapsing or becoming suspect, while psychoanalysis offered a new explanatory machine. The line works because it refuses a clean cure. It suggests that what we call “lost” meaning might not be gone at all; it’s simply inaccessible to the part of us that insists on being in control.