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 . . . .
—T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot has always been a bit of an enigma to me. An American until he was twenty-five, he thereafter thoroughly cultivated a reputation as a high-society Brit. A buttoned-down foreign transaction manager at Lloyd’s Bank (Aldous Huxley described him as “the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks”), he became one of the leading poetic lights of the early twentieth century. A man of ease and social reserve, he was enmeshed in a marriage marred by the tumult of mental illness and addiction. A friend of the elitist and atheist Bloomsbury group, he would convert to Anglo-Catholicism (upon which Virginia Woolf would write to her sister, “Poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward.”). Even his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound bestowed upon Eliot the moniker “Possum” for his tendency to conceal his true thoughts and “play dead” just so he could navigate multifarious paths through complex British society.
The writing longs and aches. It spits and sputters like wet wood consumed by tongues of fire. It is almost unrelenting.
T.S. Eliot could be an enigma.
But the trajectory of his poetry from the dark, nihilistic days following the Great War to a spark of hope that emerged even in the days of the Great Depression and the Second World War illuminates a wandering Eliot finally drawn to ground by God. “[His] poetry,” literary critic Helen Vendler noted, “embodies an enduring vision of order and moral worth in a chaotic world.”
In The Wasteland (1922), Eliot colors his images in dark and menacing hues:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
In its very beginnings, The Hollow Men (1925) unfolds a soullessness that haunted modernity:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
And ends with a pathetic lament,
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
In 1934, Eliot publishes Choruses from “The Rock” where he refines his diagnosis of the world’s malaise and waywardness:
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
And he begins to see the Light:
We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep,
Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons.
And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it;
Forever must quench, forever relight the flame.
Therefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow. . . .
And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.
O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great glory!
And then in 1943, at a turning point in the Second World War, Eliot published his masterpiece, The Four Quartets. Humility was his first and greatest teacher:
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
And its lessons bring him even closer to home. To faith. To hope. To God.
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.
Or, in the words which opened this essay:
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form. . .
In his own way, T.S. Eliot reminds me of French Catholic novelist and polemicist Georges Bernanos, in that both men’s bodies of work are undeniably haunted by suffering. The writing longs and aches. It spits and sputters like wet wood consumed by tongues of fire. It is almost unrelenting. Almost. And then, like the moments after the violent rending of the temple veil during the death agony of Christ’s passion, grace floods the scene. It is the arrival of life and fullness among hollow men and wastelands. And all is right. All is well.
T.S. Eliot has always been an enigma to me. But I know his sense of despair. I understand his pull of faith. And I comprehend his hunger for home and the sweet relief when he catches a glimpse of it:
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.
Indeed, Tom.
Indeed.