Four Quartets.

With nothing much to read (except Stephen King’s ‘11.22.63’ which is so far rather good) I felt in a mood for some poetry. ‘The Four Quartets’ is always my first choice when I get into that mood and I always find some salient wisdom.

From:    Burnt Norton:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus in your mind.

                             But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

.......

Go, go, go said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

...........

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

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.

--------

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.

Because one has only learned to get the better of words.

from:  Little Gidding.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started. 

-------

And all shall be well and

All manner of things shall be well

by the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseechings.

(these first two lines, quoted from Julien of Norwich, always make me tearful.)