rusty

It's been awhile. Ages in fact. I keep realising that it's June and spluttering expletives. The calendar in my room is still on January, as mentally, that's where I'm at. This thesis writing is a slow business, and I'm the living proof. How can it be two in the afternoon and I've written a sentence? I mean, I've done other things, some of them productive, and even thesis related, but only one sentence has yet resulted. Gah and double gah. I hope my thesis weighs more than the weight that I've put on while writing it. It may need to be printed on vellum and bound in lead.

I have, and as a result of the thesis no less - and hence justifying this posting - become somewhat intrigued by T.S. Eliot. Specifically the Dry Salvages. An excerpt:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.


The whole thing is remarkable writing, and every time I read it there is something else, some other image, that emerges from it. Because I have a gnat-like concentration span, I tend to phase in and out of actually paying attention to what I'm reading, so each time I read that poem I seem to come across a different part of it, which on the previous occasion I had momentarily paused in my absorbtion to ponder some other vital subject, like whether my car registration has expired yet. Speaking of which...