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Futility blessings

‘Four Quartets’ clip
T.S. Eliot

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate – but there is no competition –
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Words from a Trappist monk–told to me, heard from a dying monk by a hosting monk when he was younger. The first monk the hosting brother witnessed pass away in community.  The death cementing the finality of his cloistered life discernment.  The abbey graveyard became a daily reality. The words shaped his spiritual life. ‘As my life draws to an end, I realize very few things were truly any of my business’. The hosting monk, elderly during our time together, wasting time gracefully, commented: ‘When I was young, I read voraciously, now I hardly read and what I do read rarely makes sense, nor can I stay focused. I am working with watercolors, however my efforts are abysmal. I have these images and colors in my mind, yet they do not come through. I once saw a snow covered pine tree through a window frame unintentionally placing a cross before the winter scene. It seemed something important presented itself. I wanted to convey it, yet I doubt my ambition will be accomplished. My efforts are childish’.

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More pieces from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Church Bells ringing

–Sweet unction: dedicated to Ann Marie Najjar

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Four Quartets (excerpt) T.S. Eliot

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning
.

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