In my end is my beginning

T.S. Eliot -- poet, playwright, teacher / 1888 -- 1965
Robert Frost -- poet, journalist, farmer / 1874 -- 1963

What is life, other than repetition?
Part 1 of 2

There are things in our lives that seem to have happened before. These events are called "déjà vue," and they are common and well known.

There are things and events in our lives that are similar, but different. Like the sense of meeting someone and feeling like he or she is an old friend, like encountering someone known somewhere, but where or when? Like running into someone we are completely comfortable with and at home with and relaxed with and who we have known absolutely forever.

There are rings or watches that we buy which feel like they have been on our fingers or on our wrists forever, that we look at and have seen there forever -- but, that we know are only recently acquired in our lives and cannot have been from our current lives, from our contemporary pasts.

What about places? Have you ever been somewhere new to you -- in a building or in a piece of woodlands -- and known where to walk because the rooms or the grounds, strangely, were familiar?

I have felt this with a place, with a person with a piece of jewelry and -- probably unfamiliar to most -- with a particular handgun in my grasp.

It not only is mine now, it has been mine in the past -- not necessarily in ownership -- but, in the sense of affection or love or simple knowledge. Everything in and about life is transitory. Whether we accept that notion or not, it is as true as the air we breathe.

Some religions express the thought that beginning and end are the same. It might be a simple matter of definition. Maybe, there is no such thing as beginning and end, and time has always been -- sort of an atheistic "first cause" argument. Whatever ....

In a world of repetitive motions & thoughts

I am not an ardent fan of poetry, particularly that which passes for poetry since the early years of the Twentieth Century. In other words, T.S. Eliot barely passes the test in a chronological sense, but otherwise, he is among my favorites. Despite my admiration, his words have appeared in my posts only once or twice, as I recall.

The poetry of Robert Frost, who sits atop Mount Olympus, in my mind, and whose life and work span a portion of two absolutely amazing centuries during a period which claims possession of the "golden years" of America, has been mentioned a number of times on my pages.

Today, I want to take "a string" from Frost and a "loose end" from Eliot and tie them together.

First, Robert Frost. I have posted this poem before:

"The Road Not Taken"

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Now, some random lines from a work by T.S. Eliot:

"Burnt Norton"
(The first of "Four Quartets")

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
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 ....

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 ....

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after ....

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now ....

Tie the knot between these pieces, if you have the inclination to do so -- and, if you have a restless, searching soul.