Adult Reading

In my teens and 20s, as a perpetual student who always had required reading to do, I couldn't imagine why my father would choose to read "boring" scholarly works in his free time.  Now, in my 50s, I was thrilled to discover that James had T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets in his library and spent the past couple of nights reading it.  And tonight I printed out two voluminous online commentaries so I can go back and read it again with deeper insight. 

Mind you, this is T. S. Eliot, the author I stubbornly refused to read for a college course for no other reason than to be stubborn, and whose works I've continued to avoid for no other reason than to pursue an outdated pointless vendetta.  So, apparently, I've grown up.

I probably wasn't ready for Four Quartets before this, anyway.  Reading it right after euthanizing our dog Casey, which brought up layer upon layer of grief and questioning surrounding all the deaths I've experienced so far in my life, I found many stanzas sinking straight into my broken heart.  Some of these words I've heard quoted many times, but this time they sank in.

Go, go, go, said the bird:  human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

...Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

...

And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.

...

Distracted from distraction by distraction

...

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us?  After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

...

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die...

...

Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement...

                              (excerpts from "Burnt Norton," in Four Quartets)

O dark dark dark.  They all go into the dark...

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.

...

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.

...

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

     Home is where one starts from.  As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living.  Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment...

                              (excerpts from "East Coker," in Four Quartets)

The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending...

...

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing...

                              (excerpts from "The Dry Salvages," in Four Quartets)

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
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...

...You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report.  You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.  And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead:  the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

                              (excerpts from "Little Gidding," in Four Quartets)