Knowing Again ... For the Very First Time

View from the Farrar House at Little Gidding. Some rights reserved by Philocrites

We shall not cease from exploration
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.

Perspective

Newsflash ... the passing of time changes one's perspective.

Photo by Alan Cleaver. Used with permission. Click here for source.

However much I may give intellectual assent to such a proposition, it is still always something of a surprise when it actually happens in real life.

The current case in point? My youngest son is leaving this morning to drive to Wisconsin where he will intern on an organic farm for a month. He is driving. Alone.

Did I do the same sort of thing when I was his age? Of course. Did I give more than a second thought to the possibility of storms, car trouble, getting lost, or whatever? No, not really. Did I scoff at the fact that my parents and my, at the time, future mother-in-law seemed overly worried and somewhat obsessed with all of the things that could possibly go wrong? You betcha.

Ah, but now, the shoe is on the other foot. I am the parent who has been checking the weather every two seconds. I am the one who has looked at the route over and over again. I am the one who has cautioned the boy about safe places to stop and eat. I am the one who is more than a little worried about this two-day journey.

And ... I can at least contact him by cell phone. I don't really know how my parents stood it. And the only consolation I can take is that time will continue to march on and there will come that moment when my kids will "get it." When they will wake up one day and suddenly find that they are beginning to see things from their parents' perspective.

And, hopefully, I will be around to commiserate with them, because, as much as one looks forward to "growing up," when it actually happens, it's not always all that it has cracked up to be.