The paradox of the Four Quartets

T.S. Eliot loads his Four Quartets with paradoxes. “In my beginning is my end.” “Our only health is the disease” “Never and always.” Even the name is something of a paradox, at least to me. There are four poems, but isn’t that one quartet?

There are beautiful things in the poems, and as usual with Eliot, much going on underneath the surface. At this first reading, I found these lines stayed with me:

For most of us, 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; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

I like them both for their contrast with what comes before in the poem, a dismayed commentary on his culture, and for their brutal, basic truth about life.