T.S. Eliot:
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 is time conquered.
--Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton," ll. 83-90
. . . This is the use of memory:
For liberation--not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
--Four Quartets, "Little Gidding," ll. 156-165
Annie Dillard:
He knows he can't feed on the wood he loves, and he won't.
But desire walks on lean legs down halls of his sleep,
desire to drink and sup at mahogany's mass.
His wishes weight his belly. Love holds him here,
love nails him to the world, this windy wood,
as to a cross. Oh, this lanky, sunburnt cross!
Is he sympathetic? Do you care?
And you, sir: perhaps you wish to feed
on your bright-eyed daughter, on your baseball glove,
on your outboard motor's pattern in the water.
Some love weights your walking in the world;
some love molds you heavier than air.
Look at the world, where vegetation spreads
and peoples air with weights of green desire.
Crosses grow as trees and grasses everywhere,
writing in wood and leaf and flower and spore,
marking the map, "Some man loved here;
and one loved something here; and here; and here."
--"The Man Who Wishes To Feed On Mahogany,"
ll. 19-36
(Eliot comes off sounding almost Buddhist, and Dillard almost pagan, by comparison. Remarkably, neither can be quite crammed into those respective molds, even in these short excerpts.)
This is a fascinating juxtaposition, Tracy. That passage from "Burnt Norton" is my favorite piece of the Four Quartets -- I hadn't really thought about Eliot's sounding Buddhist here, but I love the time-knot he's picking apart (or, well, I love the picking apart).
ReplyDeleteIt's been a long, long time since I read Annie Dillard, and I've really only read her prose work: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Writing Life, etc. It's probably not that much of a stretch to see a kind of animism in her work, which is what these lines suggest.
Sally: On further reflection, "Stoic" might be the better word for the vibe I get from Eliot in these passages. Whether it's Buddhist or Stoic, I get it more from those "Little Gidding" lines than from the "Burnt Norton" ones. What intrigues me is that Eliot can sidle up to the Buddhist/Stoic thing (I'm abandoning attempts at precision here) but not go all the way with it--because, of course, he doesn't have to.
ReplyDeleteAnd then Dillard is over there turning cartwheels and yelling "Swedish meatballs!" at cows, as always--about as un-Eliot-like as you can get, and yet not ultimately at odds with Eliot, I think.
It's the juxtaposition that gets me-- and I *think* that's going to be a lot of what this blog is about. Much of my flesh-and-blood life has gone best when I stood back and (mostly) just let other people talk, so I think I'll try that here, too (except, apparently, in the comments threads . . .). The Dillard passage really came spontaneously to mind as I was reading through Four Quartets this morning. As this kind of thing is probably the most interesting thing that happens in my brain, I figure either it's blog-worthy, or I should stick to Twitter. So we'll see!
Thanks for your comment, which is encouraging.