The word integrity has two meanings. The first is "honesty. "We have to be honest in facing our limitations, in facing the sheer complexity of the world, honest in facing criticism even of things which are deeply precious to us. Integrity also means wholeness, Oneness, the desire for a single vision, the refusal to split our minds into separate compartments where incompatible ideas are not allowed to come into contact. An undivided mind looks in the end for an undivided truth, a Oneness at the heart of things. The whole quest for integrity presupposes that in the end we are all encountering a single reality and a single truth.
I am done with great things
And big things, great institutions
And big success, and I am for those
Tiny invisible molecular moral
Forces that work from individual
To individual, creeping through
The crannies of the world like
So many rootlets, or like the
Capillary oozing of water,
Yet which, if you give them Time
Will rend the hardest monuments
Of our pride.