T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets
 
From “East Coker”

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.
 
 _______________________
 
This month, we continue our exploration of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Let’s listen to T. S. Eliot himself read the last lines of “East Coker.”
 
The last segment of “East Coker” begins with one of Eliot’s most famous lines: “Home is where one starts from.” Throughout the poem, he has been reflecting on beginnings and endings. “East Coker” is a key place in Eliot’s history – it is where his Eliot ancestors came from, a place with special significance for him as a deep link to his adopted country of England (Eliot was born and grew up in St. Louis).  So “East Coker” is about beginnings. But the poem is also about endings. As Eliot says, “The dancers have all gone under the hill” – all those who came before him are gone, and one day he will be gone. And what happens then?
 
In this short segment, these themes of past and present, death and life, intertwine. “As we grow older, / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living.” Eliot was 52 years old when he wrote “East Coker.” He is aware that he is aging. But with age comes the realization that the world does not become more familiar with time, but rather it becomes “stranger.” He is increasingly aware that “dead and living” are woven together in a complex pattern, and that he is embedded in this pattern. He no longer sees life as a series of “intense moment[s] / Isolated, with no before and after.” Instead, he sees himself as part of something larger and much more intense: “a lifetime burning in every moment / And not the lifetime of one man only / But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.” He is part of an intensity of living that goes back to time immemorial, to those whose wrote in lost languages on stones.
 
Eliot echoes the words of Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything under the heavens”:  “There is a time for the evening under starlight, / A time for the evening under lamplight (the evening with the photograph album).” There is a time for experience, and a time for reflection and memory. But the poem does not stop there, with that neat balance. There is something that transcends the dichotomies of past and present, of memory and experience:  love. Love calls us beyond the boundaries of time and place: “Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter.”
 
The poem ends with an exhortation: “Old men ought to be explorers.” Not explorers of physical places – “here or there does not matter.” Instead, “we must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.” To be “still and still moving” is a beautiful description of the spiritual life, which is both stillness and contemplation and a journey—which the saints have described as an interior castle, a mountain, a sea. Beyond “the dark cold and empty desolation” of death is something more – “vast waters” and a new beginning: “In my end is my beginning.”
 
The month of November begins with the feasts of All Saints and All Souls – in these celebrations, the liturgy invites us to recognize what Eliot describes as the complex pattern of dead and living. We do not exist in isolation from each other. Rather, we are woven together. As we read in Lumen Gentium from the Second Vatican Council:  “Until the Lord shall come in His majesty… some of His disciples are exiles on earth, some having died are purified, and others are in glory beholding ‘clearly God Himself triune and one, as He is’ ….the union of the wayfarers with those who have gone to sleep in the peace of Christ is not in the least weakened or interrupted” (LG, 49).  The liturgy of All Souls says the same thing in another way. In the Prayer over the Offerings we pray that our departed loved ones “may be taken up into glory with your Son, in whose great mystery of love we are all united.” It is love—it is Christ who unites the living and the dead.
 
The communion of saints is that reality “where here and now cease to matter,” where love is the binding force, stronger than time, stronger than death.

Corinna Laughlin