The Treasure Shelf: Week II

The Treasure Shelf: Week II

This week I listened twice to T.S. Eliot reading through his Four Quartets and read bits and pieces of it a dozen or so times more. I want so much to just copy it all down here because it's been exploding into color in my mind this week, but I'll try to constrain myself to a few passages (update: this wasn't very successful). Please forgive how broken up the result is. It seems an injustice to take any one part of this poem away from the whole and I've ripped out many sections from their rightful place in context. 

I also read and listened to performances (by the author) of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot. I'm newly processing these and therefore have no quotes to add yet. 

My dishes and driving book this week was David Copperfield, chapters 30-45. 

3) The Four Quartets

T.S. Eliot

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future, 

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction 

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been 

Point to one end, which is always present. 

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take 

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.  

Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, 

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present. 

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.

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner 

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving, 

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

Time past and time future 

Allow but a little consciousness.

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. 

Only a flicker Over the strained time-ridden faces 

Distracted from distraction by distraction 

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning 

Tumid apathy with no concentration 

Only in time; but that which is only living 

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, 

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, 

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there 

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, 

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, 

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement, 

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation 

Between un-being and being. 

...Keeping time,

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

As in their living in the living seasons

The time of the seasons and the constellations

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. 

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

...In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood— 

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

...And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. 

And what there is to conquer 

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope 

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. 

Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

There is no end, but addition: the trailing 

Consequence of further days and hours, 

While emotion takes to itself the emotionless 

Years of living among the breakage

Of what was believed in as the most reliable— 

And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless

Or of an ocean not littered with wastage

Or of a future that is not liable

Like the past, to have no destination.

We had the experience but missed the meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness.

Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony 

(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,

Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things, 

Is not in question) are likewise permanent

With such permanence as time has. 

We appreciate this better

In the agony of others, nearly experienced,

Involving ourselves, than in our own.

For our own past is covered by the currents of action,

But the torment of others remains an experience

Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.

People change, and smile: but the agony abides.

Time the destroyer is time the preserver

At the moment which is not of action or inaction

You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being 

The mind of a man may be intent

At the time of death"—that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others:

And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare forward. 

Men's curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint—

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses, 

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. 

Here the impossible union

Of spheres of existence is actual,

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled,

Where action were otherwise movement

Of that which is only moved

And has in it no source of movement—

Driven by daemonic, chthonic

Powers. And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realised;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil. 

In windless cold that is the heart's heat,

Reflecting in a watery mirror

A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier, Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire

In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell

Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time

But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow

Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom

Of snow, a bloom more sudden

Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,

Not in the scheme of generation.

And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all. Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfillment. 

For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, 

indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives—unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:

For liberation—not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.

If I think, again, of this place,

And of people, not wholly commendable, 

Of no immediate kin or kindness,

But of some peculiar genius,

All touched by a common genius,

United in the strife which divided them; 

If I think of a king at nightfall,

Of three men, and more, on the scaffold 

And a few who died forgotten

In other places, here and abroad,

And of one who died blind and quiet 

Why should we celebrate

These dead men more than the dying?

It is not to ring the bell backward

Nor is it an incantation

To summon the spectre of a Rose.

We cannot revive old factions

We cannot restore old policies

Or follow an antique drum.

These men, and those who opposed them 

And those whom they opposed

Accept the constitution of silence

And are folded in a single party. 

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate 

We have taken from the defeated

What they had to leave us—a symbol: 

A symbol perfected in death.

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

By the purification of the motive 

In the ground of our beseeching. 

The dove descending breaks the air 

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error. 

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre— 

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love. 

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove. 

We only live, only suspire 

Consumed by either fire or fire. 

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, 

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat 

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. 

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree 

Are of equal duration.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time. 

Through the unknown, unremembered gate 

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river 

The voice of the hidden waterfall 

And the children in the apple-tree 

Not known, because not looked for 

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness 

Between two waves of the sea. 

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity 

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded 

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one. 

4) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
&
The Wasteland
T.S. Eliot