A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 2

by Glenn Hughes

 

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio.  The present essay, "A Pattern of Timeless Moments," is taken from his latest book, A More Beautiful Question. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in four parts.

 

Time and Timelessness   (concluded)

 

Eliot is intensely aware, of course, of the degree to which an explicit aware­ness of human life as existence in the in-between of immanence and tran­scendence is absent from modern consciousness.

 

And when awareness of the metaxy is eclipsed–as much of modern thought shows very well–human life comes to be conceived as an existence whose meaning is completely contained within nature or immanence–within the rhythms, repetitions, and inevita­ble defeats of temporal and material being.

 

Interpreted and self-embraced as such, this is an existence whose enjoyments tend to mask, if they don't yield to, a despair that reflects that the course of time unredeemed by a relation to timeless meaning is finally a pointlessness of "rising and falling. / Eating and drinking. Dung and death." (East Coker, I, 45-46).

 

 

 

Eliot returns repeatedly in the Quartets to the theme of modern despair in the absence of a felt sense of par­ticipation in the timelessness of the divine.

 

He describes "the strained, time-ridden faces" of those performing their daily tasks in a disenchanted world of the merely temporal, contingent, and mortal, and of the need, in the absence of feeling the presence of transcendent meaning, to be continuously "Dis­tracted from distraction by distraction" so as to avoid facing an underlying sense of emptiness and despair (Burnt Norton, III, 100-101).

 

He also describes those who do respond to intimations of a meaning beyond nature and its rhythms but who lack belief in the truth of divine transcendence–or, perhaps, lack sufficient courage, or humility, to embrace it–and so seek the supranatural somewhere within the universe of space and time, within the world of past and future.

 

 

Refusing to Recognize the Timeless

 

These are people who seek to "escape the present or the normal without proper recognition of the 'time­less'" (as Harry Blamires puts it), a search that makes its way through a wide range of occult interests and activities.¹² Eliot presents a catalog of such ac­tivities, which function psychologically as temporary anodynes to an apprehension, however inchoate, of the pointlessness of reductively temporal and material existence:

 

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,

To report the behaviour of the sea monster,

Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,

Observe disease in signatures, evoke

Biography from the wrinkles of the palm

And tragedy from fingers; release omens

By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable

With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams

Or barbituric acids, or dissect

The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors–

To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams:all these are usual

Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:

And always will be, some of them especially

When there is distress of nations and perplexity

Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.         

(Dry Salvages), V, 184-98)

 

Understandably, people search for the supranatural, because in fact we are conscious participants in such a reality; many, however, keep looking in all the wrong places.

 

Nevertheless most people, Eliot suggests, simply because consciousness is what it is, do have moments of genuine apprehension of the timeless di­mension of meaning, though they typically are incapable of accurately inter­preting, or incorporating into their self-understanding, the meaning of such experiences. "For most of us," Eliot writes,

 

. . . there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses . . .

(DS, V, 206-13)

 

Glimpses of the Divine and Freedom

 

There are indeed those rare persons–Eliot calls them saints–who manage to adjust and transform their perceptions and actions into a kind of accordance with their apprehensions of timeless meaning, to embody in the habits of their lives, in some extraordinary manner, what they have learned from their moments or visions of transcendence. But, as Hugh Kenner writes, the typical "'moment in and out of time' . . . is not the saint's beatitude, but the tempo­rary translation of that beatitude into a more familiar medium, into a mode of experience available to human kind. This is what our least time-ridden moments can give us, not timelessness but a glimpse of it . . . . "^l3

 

Glimpses, hints and guesses, Eliot tells us, are what most of us receive from our con­scious participation in divine transcendence; but this is enough to go on, he asserts, if we wish to gain freedom from the lie of reductively temporal ex­istence, reductive immanentism or materialism, and recover a sense of our existence in the metaxy. We may not be able to be saints, but we can still be human beings.

 

 

The Way of Illumination

 

Eliot indicates throughout the Quartets that there are two basic paths, two directions we can take, in the attempt to learn from our glimpses of timeless reality and to establish a remembrance of the divine ground to keep us aware of the metaxy and free us from bondage to "mere time." We can call them the way of illumination and the way of darkness.

 

The first way is exemplified in the first movement of the first poem, where Eliot recounts an unexpected mo­ment of illuminative vision while visiting the formal garden at Burnt Norton. He is standing looking down into the drained garden pool:

 

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light . . .

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.                    

(Burnt Norton), 1,34-37, 39-43)

 

This is the sort of experience–of timeless grace, of joyous illumination–that can be remembered for what it has revealed, and the recollection of it can shape one's orientation to living. In the second poem, East Coker, we are again reminded of this moment in the garden and similar types of moments, sud­den and unlooked-for occasions of illuminative joy that can promote a salu­tary remembrance of what Blamires calls "the mystery and the meaning lying beyond the temporal order":¹⁴

 

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy . . .     

(EC, III, 129-31)

 

This is one way we can approach and recollect our relation to the divine.

 

The Way of Darkness

 

Or, again, we can go by the way of darkness, of emptiness. This is the ap­proach to remembrance of the divine by way of "Emptying the sensual with deprivation / Cleansing affection from the temporal" (BN, III, 97-98). This is the descending, rather than the ascending, way, where one must "put off / Sense and notion" (Little Gidding), I, 42-43) in order to meditatively seek the empti­ness, the divine no-thing, that grounds all things. In the middle movement of Burnt Norton, the poet advises:

 

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

(BN, III, 114-21)

 

Eliot summarily recollects this path in the corresponding third movement of the following poem, East Coker: "I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God." (EC, III, 112-13).

 

Both approaches to the timeless–the path of illumination or ecstasy and the path of darkness or deprivation–are equally sources of a perennial re­membrance of transcendence, and thus a means of remembrance of our ex­istence in the metaxy.¹⁵ Their recurrent descriptions and juxtapositions as a central theme of the poem-cycle suggest why Eliot chose as one of his two ep­igraphs for Four Quartets the famous dictum of Heraclitus: "The way up and the way down are one and the same" (Diels, Fr. 60).

 

 

Life not a Process of Growth in Time

 

Now if, Eliot indicates, we remain sufficiently aware that existence is lived in what Voegelin calls the metaxy, then we shall come to understand in a man­ner rather different than is now typical how meaning accrues to personal ex­istence. As moderns, we tend to imagine life's meaning as an accretion of experience and knowledge during the process of growth in time, so that the point and purpose of a life is its development in time, heading toward the ripeness of maturity and the (hoped-for) wisdom of late years.

 

But in remem­bering that at every point of presence in time we participate in the timeless meaning of the divine ground of being, we discover that existence is not primarily a matter of temporal fulfillments or of growing toward rounded or completed meaning in time.

 

Remembering our involvement in divine time­lessness, we recognize that the divinely intended meaning of our existence is not, in its deepest significance, a journey through the world of time toward its mortal end, but a journey of coming to discover and respond to our par­ticipation in the timeless–a journey toward God, structured from its begin­ning as a search for God.

 

Then we see that our special moments of glimpses and hints, our "moments in and out of time," are, and ought to consciously remain, the crucially revealing elements concerning our life's meaning.

 

Conquering Time through Time

 

Understanding this, we can also recognize that we are never, at whatever stage in life, other than in "the middle" of existence–that is, in the in-between of time and timelessness, ignorance and knowledge, world and transcendence. This is a truth ever in danger of being ignored or forgotten through our being distracted by physical, egoistic, and worldly desires, and by every temptation that cultures of hedonism and immanentism can offer–a perilous situation symbolized by Eliot in declaring that we are

 

In the middle, not only in the middle of the way

But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,

And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,

Risking enchantment.

(EC, II, 89-93)

 

Dante's crisis moment, at the start of his Commedia, of finding himself lost in a dark wood at the midpoint of his life, is transformed by Eliot into a reminder of the difficulty and need of recollecting our life in the metaxy in our own age of distinctively modern dangers and enchantments.

 

Our task is to keep our balance–what Voegelin calls the "balance of con­sciousness"–where we neither allow the timeless dimension of meaning to be forgotten (the typically modern problem) nor allow an awareness of time­less reality to so fascinate us that we devalue or dismiss as insignificant our lives in time and their biographical unfolding.¹⁶ As Voegelin remarks in his "Notes" on the Quartets, a "spiritual autobiography is the history of a spirit joined to body, and the body lives in the here and now of a definite locale."¹⁷

 

Eliot's grounding of the Quartets in the geographical and biographical details of his own experiences and in his family's history, including constant refer­ences to what are clearly authors and texts, encounters and events that hold special meaning for him, underscore the fact that the journey to God is always undertaken as the unique journey of a concrete person in concrete places and times, facing uniquely personal challenges and opportunities.

 

We must not succumb to the popular modern delusion that reality is the temporal realm alone; but we also mustn't forget that it is only through our life in time, with all its sufferings and joys, its hopes and uncertainties, and its uses of memory and forethought, that we are granted access to the timeless. Life in time is the condition through which we have been graced with the opportunity to seek our true end, the timeless "ground of our beseeching" (LG, III, 199). As Eliot states in Burnt Norton:

 

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.                  

(BN, II, 84-89)

 

 

 

 

This is part 2 of a four part article. Part 3 may be read HERE. Part 1 may be read HERE.

 

NOTES

(for fuller citations see the bibliography in Professor Hughes' book)