T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets feels like a journey through time—not just in a linear sense, but in a way that makes time fold in on itself, looping, spiraling.
It’s as if Eliot is walking with us through his memories, through history, and through quiet moments of contemplation, pointing out how the past and the present constantly overlap, how moments seem to shimmer with echoes of everything that came before.
"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.
Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, as if himself is trying to map the ways time isn’t this neat, orderly thing we experience in our homogenous "empty" times, but something more fluid, more elusive.
His Christian faith weaves into this too, with notions of redemption, eternity, and spiritual awakening surfacing again and again, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the way out of time’s endless cycle is through understanding the divine.
Four Quartets calms me, and make me feel good. Just good.
Chaos
“Being thrown in the world, existing, with no origin and no end .”
Modern science would still prefer a precise computation method to establish any sort of causal determinist relation, but how do we take Chaos theory and Phenomenology into consideration when investigating our human subject behavior and conducting experiments?
