 |
| View from the Farrar House at Little Gidding. Some rights reserved by Philocrites |
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
So ends the last of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, entitled "Little Gidding." It also happens to be my favorite line in the whole series of poems and may very well be my favorite line in all of T. S. Eliot's poetry. I was captivated by the line when I did an intensive study of T. S. Eliot during my junior year of college. Now, nearly 30 years later, I think I am beginning to have an inkling of what Eliot was getting at.
In so many different area of my life I feel as though I am returning to the ideas, opinions, and passions of my youth, but with an understanding that I never could have had when I was in my teens and twenties. More than once over the last couple of years, people who have only known me recently have said things like, "well, after you changed your thoughts about ..." or "when your opinion changed regarding ..." However, the funny thing is that I have found myself explaining that it was not so much a change as a return. But it is not just a returning to things that I thought and cared about back in the day. It is a rediscovery that is new and exhilarating because it is as though I now understand why it was that I cared about such notions in the first place.
The return might be unsettling, I suppose, for those who have only known me through one chapter of my life, but since I've lived with me all these years it feels much more like finally coming home to my real self. In C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia there is Narnia, but then there is the really-real Narnia -- the one for which the original Narnia was but a shadow and a proleptic glimpse of the real deal. When our explorations bring us at last to the place we started, with eyes that have matured along the way, it is both a place we have always known and, at the same time, a place we have never really known at all.
After the lines above, the poem concludes with the following:
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
I think that I am beginning to hear, or maybe only half-hear, the voice of the hidden waterfall. It doesn't mean that everything is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it does mean that there is the slightest hint that once all the exploring is complete, all truly shall be well.
No comments:
Post a Comment