Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Text
http://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/...

Audio
http://youtu.be/icWQGrhdr7E

Notes
http://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/cokerout...
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/elio...

Photos
http://classprojects.kenyon.edu/engl/...

Analysis
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma99/kidd...

I

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

"East Coker" appeared five years after "Burnt Norton."

Says Eliot:

"Burnt Norton might have remained by itself if it hadn't been for the war, because I had become very much absorbed in the problems of writing for the stage and might have gone straight on from The Family Reunion to another play. The war destroyed that interest for a time: you remember how the conditions of our lives changed, how much we were thrown in on ourselves in the early days? East Coker was the result—and it was only in writing East Coker that I began to see the Quartets as a set of four."

The dancing part is very far from anything in The Wasteland.

Lovely, isn't it, Mary?

In The Waste Land we had rats aplenty; here we have a cute little field mouse trotting along the wainscot.

Laurel wrote: "In The Waste Land we had rats aplenty; here we have a cute little field mouse trotting along the wainscot."

On behalf of the rats, I protest against this flagrant discrimination based on species!

:)

Keeping in mind the lines from Burnt Norton:

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
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; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

Here it appears Eliot is involved with the past, with his beginning, which is his end. He returns to East Coker, where his family came from, and where his body now lies. Is this part of the process of conquering time?

Eliot references or mimics the time passage from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 quite a bit in East Coker.


For reference (using the English Standard Version:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stone, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

Thomas wrote: "Keeping in mind the lines from Burnt Norton:

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
Th..."

I get the feeling that for Eliot, time is circular. However, many representations of time are linear. And many ways in which we consider time, i.e. the past cannot be changed, is also linear. Could trying to understand time as a circle be a form of conquering time?

I'm curious why Eliot used what looks like Middle English spelling in these lines about the dancing:

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde.

Tiffany wrote: "I'm curious why Eliot used what looks like Middle English spelling in these lines about the dancing:

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodious sacrament.
Two and two, necess..."


"The archaic spelling "In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie" and "necessarye coniunction/ Holding eche other [. . .] Which betokeneth concorde" are lines taken from Elyot's The Governour, and thus suggest the language and motifs of past generations. (14-47)"

http://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/cokerout...

(Sir Thomas Elyot was an ancestor of T.S. Eliot.)

Tiffany wrote: "Could trying to understand time as a circle be a form of conquering time? "

I'm not sure. The difficulty I have is that Eliot seems to think there is a definite beginning and end, and a circular model does not allow for that. There is a concept in Buddhism called "dependent origination" that deals with this problem very well, but that concept doesn't help us if Eliot thinks that there is a definite beginning and end.

Eliot appears to be playing on the two senses of "end" here: the end of time, as in his death, and his end, as in his purpose. Here he is going to his beginning in time, in the person of Sir Thomas Elyot and his ancestors from centuries past. Will he find his "end" or purpose by looking back at these folks?

This is really the only part of the whole works that really resonated for me. I first encountered the lines about time when I was in college and studying American literature of the south--Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren in particular. A persistent theme was the haunting past which as Faulkner wrote in Absalom, Absalom" "The past is never dead. It isn't even past."

It also resonates now because of my interest in Eastern philosophy and the yoga path. Here, as others have pointed out, the notion that time is not linear is crucial. In fact, I think it is interesting that for most of Western history --until the invention of the clock-- life followed the patterns and rhythms of circles as well. I am not sure we are better off for having developed the concept of linear time.

Tiffany wrote: "Eliot references or mimics the time passage from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 quite a bit in East Coker.


For reference (using the English Standard Version:
For everything there is a season, and a time for..."

I thought of that also as I read those lines. Yea me!

If we live in the moment, each moment ends and the next moment is a new beginning. Just thinking out loud.

Since East Coker was his home, is he trying to go back to his beginning to understand his place in time? The ending words "in my beginning." is he setting out to understand the journey of his life in time? How is he connected with family/society, Could the circular feel be the progression of life and death through the generations?

Thomas Howard:

'The opening, brief sentence of this section is a variation on a quote attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, as she mounted the scaffold to be beheaded at the command of her Protestant cousin, Elizabeth I. Mary is said to have remarked, “In my end is my beginning”, thus testifying to her Christian hope that this “end”—the scaffold—marks the beginning of the real, indestructible, eternal destiny for which she was created. If you turn her words around backward, as Eliot has done here, you get the same thing. In my beginning (my birth) my end (my destiny) is already embodied. The full oak tree is the end closeted in the acorn. This strikes the note for “East Coker”, like a tuning fork.' —Dove Descending: A Journey into T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

Regarding @18. From the Bhagavad Gita:

"Death is inevitable for the living; birth is inevitable for the dead."

II.27 Translation by Eknath Easwarian

"Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meaning."

This last reading this section resonated with what I was doing reading the poem, looking for meaning and trying to articulate it.

Anyone else?

Don wrote: ""Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meaning."

This last reading this section resonated with what I was doing reading the poem, looking for meaning and trying to articul..."

Exactly, Don. And he really wants us to understand his meaning.

Zeke wrote: "Regarding @18. From the Bhagavad Gita:

"Death is inevitable for the living; birth is inevitable for the dead."

II.27 Translation by Eknath Easwarian"

"And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."
—Hebrews 9:27

II

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. 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.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

Laurel @21 quotes:

"And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."
—Hebrews 9:27

In the Bhagavad Gita, the judgment would come not from an arbiter, and would not involve the eternal salvation or damnation of the judged. (The linear view of life.) Instead, it would be the "natural" result of the life lived by the deceased indicating what still needs to be worked on in the next life. (Circles of karmic reincarnation until one achieves union -yoga- with the Superconscious Godhead.)

Disclaimer: I do not in any way consider myself expert in these areas. I would welcome any correction.

Disclaimer made, I do think it is interesting to look at the ways Eastern and Western traditions view these questions. There are places they move towards each other, and places that appear incompatible. Is this what Eliot is exploring?

@14 Thomas wrote: "Eliot appears to be playing on the two senses of "end" here: the end of time, as in his death, and his end, as in his purpose..."

I see the sense of 'end' as end of time/death, but I'm struggling to see the other sense of 'end' as end of purpose. Was he losing faith or inspiration in his poetry and plays? Was he plagued by self-doubt at this point in his life?

Zeke wrote: "I do not in any way consider myself expert in these areas. I would welcome any correction.."

It's safe to say that none of us are experts in these areas. We're all here to help each other and be helped. :)

I agree with you that Eliot is exploring and perhaps reconciling different philosophical and religious traditions. But when I read the Four Quartets, nothing stand out to me as typically "Eastern" or "Western" --those labels are just too vague to be helpful.

Perhaps Eliot is saying that time is both linear and circular: Any circle is linear on an infinitesimal scale. (People used to believe the Earth was flat, because it IS flat on a local scale!) Any point in a circle is a linear beginning and end in one, the linear past is also the future in a circular movement.

Dante represents both Paradise and Inferno as people living/moving in circles, different types of circles. The difference is that the the former has God at their Center, whereas the latter Satan.

"Union with the Godhead" seems to be the common theme among all religions. Man wants to be like God, even Nietzsche who proclaimed "God is dead".

Laurel wrote: ""And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."
—Hebrews 9:27

And that's why I suspect that Eliot's theology cannot be circular. There are some aspects of Eastern thought which creep into this poem, but reincarnation and dependent origination are not among them. (Western contemplatives often sound quite similar to Eastern ones, which I think is extremely cool. See Thomas Merton, for example.)

But as far as the nature of the soul goes, I suspect Eliot is more with Dante and St. Thomas than Krishna or Buddha. The end is the end of this world, and the beginning of an entirely different one.

Tiffany wrote: "I see the sense of 'end' as end of time/death, but I'm struggling to see the other sense of 'end' as end of purpose. Was he losing faith or inspiration in his poetry and plays? Was he plagued by self-doubt at this point in his life? ."

I may have jumped the gun a bit by bringing this up. Hang in there because Eliot deals with this more directly later in the poem.

Thomas wrote: "Laurel wrote: ""And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."
—Hebrews 9:27

And that's why I suspect that Eliot's theology cannot be circular. There are some aspects ..."

Yes, he is writing as a firm convert to Anglican theology. He studied Eastern philosophy at Harvard, and he brings it in, I think, as a starting point for some of his readers.

Laurel wrote: "I

In my beginning is my end.
...
In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl. ..."

The "early owl" is an inverted reference to Hegel's "owl of Minerva", which is always late. Hegel's late owl is a symbol of Philosophy, the wisdom of man, in hindsight, whereas Eliot's early owl refers to the eternal Wisdom, which is (before) the beginning and (after) the end. The day begins at nightfall, when the owl takes its flight. In my beginning is my end.

Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."
--Hegel "Philosophy of Right"Preface

Laurel wrote: "The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.."

There was some speculation about Eliot's sexual orientation in the TWL thread. Here, at the very least, he acknowledges that his beginning is in "the coupling of man and woman". (Is it a mere coincidence that we're reading this at the time of the landmark SCOTUS decision?)

Right, Nemo; he is concerned with the healing and continuing of civilization.

Laurel wrote: "In The Waste Land we had rats aplenty; here we have a cute little field mouse trotting along the wainscot."

From Helen Gardner's The Composition of... p. 97...

"Hayward...making no doubt some objection to [field-mice] in a house. Eliot replied:

Fieldmice. They DID get into our country house in New England [...] we always restored them to the Land, and only slew the housemice. But the particular point here is that the house is supposed to have been long deserted or empty. Do housemice go on living in an unoccupied house? If so, I had better alter this; because I admit that in a tenanted house the fieldmouse is an exception."

I gave thought to the houses representing men (houses as bodies).
And that there is a time when one needs to be shaken.

"And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane (an older person? physical deterioration? That a person needs to be broken? Opened to more than the life he has been living? The wind being, perhaps, the voice the spirit of God?)

And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots (so... With the field-mouse... This person is an exception? Perhaps a person willing?/able? to re-examine ?)

And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto (the arras being family inhertances handed-down... So... To question what one had accepted as one's family 'truths'...?)

Isn't wainscoting a surface decoration?

(Perhaps meaning shake off that which is extraneous---distractions --- so that the important structural elements can be examined and possibly be repaired.)

"In March 1939, Elliot gave his three lectures on The Idea of a Christian Society and there he spoke openly and earnestly of his profound disheartenment:

I believe that there must be many persons who, like myself, were deeply shaken by the events of September 1938, in a way from which one does not recover; persons to whom that month brought a profounder realization of a general plight... The feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment; what had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not, I repeat, a criticism of the government,but a doubt of the validity of a civilization" (A Reading of... p. 55).

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

How curiously unpoetic! I read somewhere that in addition to Beethoven's String Qt Op. 132 that Eliot was also thinking of Bartok's String Quartets when he was writing FQ. Those quartets can be a bit strident at times, and I hear that in this section.

Adelle wrote: "..a profounder realization of a general plight... a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment; what had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible.."

The prophets in the OT must have had the same feeling.

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

It sounds like history will repeat itself and there's nothing to be done about it. What we think we know is only a pattern we have imposed on a moving picture. Experience cannot tell us what will be, only what has already been, and that is indeed of "limited value". Sigh.

It was a depressing time. W.H. Auden put his reaction a year later, titling the poem "September 1, 1939."

a sample:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

Thomas wrote: "That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not ..."

Howard Thomas:

"“That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory. . .” Has any one of us ever read a poem with that sort of line in it? The poet turning to us from his desk, as it were, and saying that? Hardly. The thing this poet doesn’t like is “periphrasis”—the roundabout way of saying things. Nor does he like hackneyed poetical fashions, which, far from startling us awake, only lull us (tra-la, tra-la, tra-la), leaving the poet with the whole job to do over again if he wants his poetry to have any force to it.

"It may surprise us to hear about this “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings”. At least it will surprise us if we had supposed that poetry emerges if we just scribble down any windy lines that flit through our imagination (which, alas, seems to be the idea behind all undergraduate attempts at verse).

"And how can a poet as serious as Eliot expect us to believe that “the poetry does not matter”? We will come upon more about this in “Little Gidding”, where the poet, speaking with the “familiar compound ghost” (Dante?), learns that indeed the poetry does not matter, in the light of the Reality that the mere poetry bespeaks. But the poets have to keep on trying; otherwise language will sink into mere Dadaism, and all discourse will have collapsed, and the ice will have taken over.

"Eliot has omitted the period at the end of that half line about the poetry not mattering. Surely this is a typo, or a lapse in the poet’s attention? Hardly. My own guess is that what we have there is the poet brushing aside the statement as a mere remark, spoken sotto voce, if we will, and tailing off while he starts over, and barely asking the dignity we accord a punctuated sentence."
—Dove Descending

III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
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. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
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.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

Laurel wrote: "Thomas wrote: "That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The p..."

I agree this is at first glance a very odd metacognitive passage. For one thing, I wasn't sure whether to read it as Eliot himself or as a speaker separate from him lamenting the insufficiency of language. But if you stay with that voice through the end of this section, I think it makes perfect sense. The poet seems to be questioning whether he/she has the sort of wisdom required to write a poem that will "matter," since any experience he/she has is suspect and poets work in patterns that may well be deceptions. Great writers have always been insecure about their work, feeling there is "no secure foothold."
"The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."
The poet is writing for us (the poem is published), but it's best to serve it up humbly, with an acknowledgment that it is necessarily created of language, which is limited and patterned and inadequate to express what the poet had thought he/she might be able to express before beginning. (It's an "intolerable wrestle with words and meanings" that turns out to be "not...what one had expected.") Still, here it is, reader, for what it's worth. I give it to you humbly, the poet seems to be saying.
And, will the poem be any more lasting than the houses and the dancers? In the larger scope of time, it's unlikely.

Nemo wrote: "But when I read the Four Quartets, nothing stand out to me as typically "Eastern" or "Western" --those labels are just too vague to be helpful."

I'm with Zeke on this one--I've noted over and over again references to Eastern thought. I'm afraid I don't know enough to elaborate much because a great deal of my "education" in this area comes informally, from 15 years of yoga classes. (Unfortunately, yoga is often taught in this country without "yoking" the spiritual to the physical as intended, but if you have a good teacher you can learn a lot more than how to do a good "downward dog.") At the same time, though I have a Christian background, I've noted fewer references to Western religious thought as I've been reading. Not a definitive Eastern/Western critique of where Eliot's sensibilities lie, to be sure, but my first impressions of the poem certainly lean toward the Eastern.

For example:
"Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable" (from "Burnt Norton")

and again, from "East Coker":
"The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

I don't think Eastern/Western are unhelpful labels--or, at least, I don't think it's unhelpful to note these influences. Eastern and Western spiritual thought do have different emphases, and I think it's interesting to note the appearance of both here. Eliot isn't stuck in his own cultural traditions. There is something very appealing about Eastern thought for those of us living in a Western culture. The Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau) explored it, too.

Kathy wrote: "and again, from "East Coker":
"The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.""

In what way is this Eastern rather than Western? It is not, after all, for nothing that Socrates is the wisest man in the world because he knew he knew nothing.

To try to clarify regarding Eastern/Western difference. There are two salient aspects as I see it that may be relevant here.

First is a belief in reincarnation; an never ending cycle unless/until one achieves various kinds of spiritual "awakening." Which leads to the second difference.

The escape from the cycle of reincarnation is "union" with the Godhead--the "yoking" that Kathy mentioned. The original purpose of yoga was as an aid to the meditation which leads to this enlightened state beyond consciousness.

In Western religions God is a creator and is separate from His creation. Eastern religion is not dualistic in this way. God is within us and in every material thing. Finding God is literally finding ourselves.

I believe these concepts of transcendence and monism are part of the reason that Emerson, and other transcendentalists who were moving beyond their Protestant denominations were drawn to Eastern thinkers.

Kathy wrote: "Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable"."

This line reminded me of Aristotle's treatise On the Soul, where he states that desire exists only in beings with sense perception, i.e., animals and humans but not vegetables, and that desire is the cause of movement (towards its object). Desire signifies a lack or deficiency in the desiring being, therefore not in itself desirable.

"The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

True humility is imposible without true knowledge of self. As Mary already noted, there is humility when one knows that he knows nothing. There is also Christian humility, when one acknowledges that "every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights"

"Humility is endless". In other words, humanly impossible.

Zeke wrote: "First is a belief in reincarnation; an never ending cycle unless/until one achieves various kinds of spiritual "awakening.""

The ancient Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Plato believed in reincarnation, which is compatible with the immortality of the soul. (If the soul is immortal and the body is not, there are only two states in which a soul can exist: either by itself or by joining a new body repeatedly). Plato also believed that the soul is better without the body, and its ideal state is in eternal contemplation of the Good.

Christianity doesn't teach reincarnation, as shown by the passage in Hebrews 9 that Laurel posted. Theological doctrine aside, I think the basic argument boils down to this: there is no point repeating the same task over and over again, if you can do it once for all in one lifetime. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a similar idea in Chinese Buddhism as well. "苦海无涯回头是岸", which can be loosely translated as, "The sea of suffering is endless, repent and you'll reach the shore".

This brings us to the second point: the union with Godhead

It seems to me that the idea of "yoga/yoking" implies duality, for it is the joining/union of two entities. If God is not distinct from man, but is within man, the union is already achieved, why is there still a need for "yoking"?

Christianity teaches that Christ is both God and Man, duality in unity, and He is the Way through which Man has access to God, the Ladder between Heaven and Earth, which Eliot alludes to in Burnt Norton.

II

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.


This was written during the Blitzkrieg, "when doubts were rampant, chaos threatening to engulf rationality, and faith in reality fragile at best." —John Booty, Meditating on Four Quartets, p. 22

Is the world better off today?

Russell Kirk:

'Darkness falls upon the captains and the kings, in the third movement— upon the financiers and the industrialists, too, of our purblind materialistic age, and upon all who, with Coriolan, have paraded their vain ambitions for an hour. Again we glimpse the Underground, with the empty faces of passengers succumbing to “the growing terror of nothing to think about.” We wait without thought, and even without hope, upon the coming of God. There is left to us faith alone, and trust in providential purpose. Again, the via negativa is our only path to wisdom— a way without ecstasy.

'The motto of the Eliot family, the “silent motto” woven upon the tattered arras of “East Coker,” was tace et fac “be silent and act,” or “be still and still moving.” The only action possible for us is the act of faith. Wait upon the coming of God, for no man is autonomous. The false dawn of Renaissance humanism was hubristic, and for that pride we pay now. If we renounce the ego, we may achieve consciousness. So in the fourth movement we are reminded that in Adam’s fall, we sinned all. Christ, the wounded surgeon, operates upon us; this world is a spiritual hospital; the Church, our dying nurse; we cannot be hale until we have passed through purgatorial fires. Here, as so often in Eliot’s writings, the critic with a smattering only of theology and church history begins to debate with himself and his colleagues about whether Eliot was really a Catholic, or really a Puritan. This tedious debate is unnecessary: for Eliot, here and elsewhere, is the disciple of Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose patrimony Catholic and Calvinist share. There ring echoes of Sir Thomas Browne and of Saint John of the Cross in his fourth movement, but within the encompassing orthodoxy of Augustine. Man and society suffer from a wasting disease of spirit, never to be cured wholly in this world. Eliot’s cry is Henry Vaughan’s: “There is in God (some say)/ A deep, but dazzling darkness … O for that night! where I in him/ Might live invisible and dim.”' —Eliot and His Age