a toast to Eliot

I've been thinking about time...mostly about not having enough of it, I suppose. My work day blows away in a midst of papers and key-strokes, sometimes drags in between bleary eyed computer stares and counting the birds perched on the power lines outside my window, but the work piles up the same. I think in cliches: so much work, so little time.

I'm left with the longing for time to just sit, just think, just spend some hours to process all the whirling changes, the tangled knots of life that only get more twisted everytime I shove them back in the "later" box that I'll open when I have more time.

I remembered a "floaty," metaphysical paper I wrote about the relationship of time & Christ's death as portrayed in several of T.S. Eliot's major works--the whole point of it being that in his poetry time is presented as one of the things redeemed by Christ's death, time itself, as well as humankind from it. A few lines from The Four Quartets keep running through my mind:

"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. "

and

"But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time is the occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love."

And...this is the part of the post where I'm perhaps supposed to ask poignant questions, draw some conclusions about how this poetry intersects with my life right now...but honestly I don't have any (conclusions), so I'll just throw some Eliot on the screen & some of my own uncollected and somewhat tangled threads of thoughts...