"In my end is my beginning..."

In 1995, on a sunny spring day in England, I had a meeting with the bursar of Magdalen College at Cambridge University. At one point he asked me if I would like to see the Pepys Library. Samuel Pepys was perhaps the most famous diarist in English literature, having served as a senior official for two kings in the 17th century. In his will, Pepys gave his library to his alma mater, with the proviso that if even one book were lost from it, the entire library would be transferred to King's College. In almost 300 years, no book has ever been lost.

Knowing that I admired the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the bursar remarked that the original manuscript of Eliot's "Four Quartets" was in the Pepys Library. Eliot had spent several summers at Magdalen and had given some of his papers to the college. And so it was that I got to hold in my hands a surprisingly small number of yellow legal pad sheets on which the man thought by many to be the greatest poet in English in the 20th century had written what I regarded as the greatest poem of that century. Eliot's small, delicate handwriting was very precise, and I was struck by how few revisions there were -- really only a few words crossed out here and there.

Books have been written about "Four Quartets", and I'm not a literary scholar. But I had always loved this poem's exquisite, honest and yet stormy writing as it lies across the pages -- a darkly piercing and yet somehow illuminated exploration of time, history and the individual's ability to savor and then override the deep specific pull that the earth exerts on us. Eliot knew that life is a succession of conscious moments, in which inchoate faith meets hard mortality and then passes directly through it, as if it were nothing. The poem drives toward a complete revelation, an understanding that transcends the modern, post-traditional period of which Eliot was a progenitor -- an understanding which nevertheless remained rooted in the language and ideas of that tradition, so that what is old becomes what is new. But there is no revelation. There is no neatly wrapped ultimate meaning. We take the journey with him, yet when we get to the shore and step on the dock, the ship has sailed. But we sailed with it.

Here are passages from "Four Quartets":

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...

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
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning...

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
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...

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices...

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...

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.