I dare you to read Eliot's "Burnt Norton" and not assume it was written about today...

BLOT: (17 Aug 2011 - 11:15:46 PM)

I dare you to read Eliot's "Burnt Norton" and not assume it was written about today...

There are a lot of ways that the present, and all is complaints and bellyaches, are nothing but echoes of what was already said...tonight's little treat is the third section of the first quartet—i.e. Burn Norton—of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets". If you are not convinced he was a time traveller, wait until you read the last line of the first part, the one that begins "Not here the darkness...". This was 1935 or '36, people:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. 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
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

T.S. Eliot

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: August 2011