Finding Myself -- T. S. Eliot and "Four Quartets"

2020 is here, and I'm still standing. I will celebrate a new year with new promise. Also, I will spend this time of reflection and anticipation to consider who I am and what I am to become. Revelations are bittersweet in terms of progress, yet the future offers new and bold opportunities for self discovery.

I certainly don't claim to be a sage; however, I can relate my present feelings in hopes of reaching some measure of understanding. This is my obligation, if not to others on their own journey, then to myself.

I am 69 years-old and still searching. At various times during my life, I thought I had found myself and become a person with unshakable, fixed understandings. But now, I believe that rigid attainment would limit my life. You see, I have learned after a long life of changes and adjustments, that diehard beliefs must often be challenged … and eventually changed.

“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.”

– T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943)

T.S. Eliot wrote Four Quartets in pieces. The set of four poems are full of allusions, and Eliot wrote the poems before and during World War II. He believed there was something worth defending in society and that Germany had to be stopped. The war became central to one of the poems, “Little Gidding,” as Eliot added in aspects of his own experience while serving as a watchman at the Faber building during the London blitz. The Four Quartets were favored as giving hope during the war and also for a later religious revival movement.

I am not sharing all of Eliot's biographical notes and complex references to Anglo-Catholicism and mystical, philosophical and poetic works. Someone much more qualified can enlighten the reader about this. Instead, I choose to share my personal reflections on the text of the work. I feel connected to Eliot's words in time.

Written over a period of eight years, from 1935 to 1942, Four Quartets is marked by a sense of circularity (of the cyclical) and haunted by notions of returns and returning. Because “time past” and “time present” are enveloped by “time future,” Eliot suggests that “all time is un-redeemable.” This means that time cannot be treated in abstraction but as the vital ground of human reality. Lived time, as this is embodied by individual human beings, is Eliot’s main focus in Four Quartets.

I so appreciate Eliot's work in relation to my own life. Indeed, at my age, I do understand time is un-redeemable, and I realize more than ever before that time grounds me in a state of human reality. My never-ending search for meaning during this time is something I often contemplate.

“What might have been” – this is merely an abstract notion in my life. I really only “am” what actually came to pass. My reality is not comprised of lost opportunities, rather it consists of time lived.

“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.”

“East Coker,” Number 2 of Four Quartets

I have found living in an ever-evolving world is largely out of my control, so throughout my life I have learned to surrender to changes I could not anticipate. While encountering these “strange and complicated patterns,” I try to remain a continuous learner, not only one actively looking for new information, but a person even more willing to challenge my previous belief systems. I believe monumental adjustments are necessary, and I am certain my life is better for making these adjustments.

“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 …
In my end is my beginning.”

“East Coker,” Number 2 of Four Quartets

I refuse to be satisfied with a stagnant existence. Old age offers a time of renewal. What Eliot calls searching for “what has been lost and found and lost again” is a practice of humility. Eliot confirms “there is only the trying.” To remain an explorer, I must move, not always questioning the motion, but instead trusting in the eventual destination. During this journey, I have discovered that so many of my old views are counter productive and dead wrong. Indeed, “in my end is my beginning.”

In my life, action produces new understandings. As I try to realize meaning, I understand the importance of freedom of thought. The effort is paramount even if the “aim is never here to be realized.” The hope is that continual effort enriches my life.

Ezra Pound coined the word “periplum” (circumnavigation) to describe a journey where the traveler ends up back where he started, and this, in probably the most famous lines from Four Quartets is what Eliot expresses when he talks of “arriving where we started” and “knowing the place for the first time.” I, too, feel love is a crucial aspect of remaining conscious and present throughout existence. Soul can come to know itself in time. Perhaps, redemption is never a destination of arrival but a commitment to the search for discovery.

Of course any enlightenment is potentially life changing. What should I do with new understandings? Eliot's words remind me of an old quote. Layman Pang, a Buddhist in the Zen tradition who lived from 740–808, wrote the following:

“My daily activities are not unusual,
I’m just naturally in harmony with them.
Grasping nothing, discarding nothing.
In every place there’s no hindrance, no conflict.
My supernatural power and marvelous activity:
Drawing water and chopping wood.”

Pang's words have been conveniently paraphrased as this popular sentiment:

“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”

To me, this means breaking life down into the simplicity of the present moment. Carrying the full weight of the past and the future all the time, I miss the beauty of the moment – the time I actually live. How important it is to find that labor is no longer a burden. Wood is chopped. Water is carried. Life happens. This is the beauty of awareness – enlightenment is transient without end.