I have been extraordinarily impacted by someone who died 21 years before I was born and that I had never heard of before last week. A friend introduced me to T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” and I haven’t quite recovered. Being a fan of the Western school of thought, I thoroughly enjoy basking in the precision of logic and the mathematics, as it were, of thought. I find myself however having a strong tendency to constrain all trains of thought that don’t quite match up to my interpretation of logic. If that didn’t make sense, then welcome to my world!
What I mean is this: I can’t quite listen to what doesn’t make sense to me; I find myself constantly having to alter the ideas before they are even fully developed in order to make an attempt at progressive thinking. I find myself having to ignore the possible distractions in the room, distractions in my mind, distractions inherent to the topic itself…the list goes on; rather than taking in everything at hand. (…hmmm “distracted from distraction by distraction”???…) It’s as if I already have the picture that I’m looking for and I’m just looking for the puzzle pieces to get me there. Eliot however shows no trace of such things. It’s as if his mind is free roaming and is guided (by providence it would seem) to what turns out to be logic! This has thrown a glitch in the beautiful mechanics of all of my narrow-mindedness…what is to be done?!?!?!
Anyway, I’ll spare you the drooling and babbling in a stupor about how my old way of thinking turns out to be incomplete.
Impacting excerpts that have opened for me a window to a world…
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.”
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.”
-T.S. Eliot
(taken from “Burnt Norton” -“Four Quartets”)
2 comments:
Its funny how all of a sudden T.S Elliot has recently opened up my eyes as well! When I intially bought the book I must have read through it at least four times. All the while knowing that there was something very deep about what he was saying, however , it never occured to me what it exactly it was.
After lately having been contemplating time, I randomly picked the book back up and it was as if the whole first chapter (if thats what you call it) hit me square in the face!! Everything made sense..."to be conscious is not to be in time". Never having thought of it that way, yet some how it made sense. To be conscious means to be in the ultimate reality of the present. We however, merely experience reality successively never able to hold onto the present. I especially liked what he said about the key to the past is held in the future but the key to the future and present are held in the past. It all made more sense than I could adequately articulate. Therefore for I shall quit rambling!! :~)
AHHHH...HE'S ALIVE!!! (I knew that the Real Nick was alive, but I thought perhaps the Virtual Nick was missing. :-p)
T.S. Eliot: I seriously can enter a little zone when reading him.
I don't know if you remember Wayne talking about this kind of stuff a couple of years ago, but it really makes me think of how I really don't know anything. How can I KNOW anything really when I see everything successively and I have such a terrible memory. Not to mention that I never really understood the fragment that I experienced to begin with since I'd have to have the whole in order to understand its parts (sounds a little like the philosophical definition of “information” on www.mereorthodoxy.com ).
Thanks for the T.S. recommendation; I’ll have something to chew on for years to come. :o)
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