Overture

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly 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.

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 ...

This is by far one of my favorite poems -- for the language and the imagery, but also because it takes that unidentifiable feeling in the pit of a young twenty-something and gives it a face. L'entre deux guerres. A wholly new start. Imprecision of feeling. For us, there is only the trying.

I started this blog because I'm working a job that lobotomy patient could succeed at, and I'm desperately trying to preserve the few braincells I haven't already killed with this secretarial-induced coma and bourbon. I used to write often, and even occasionally well, so here's me grasping at the used-to-be. I began by including this poem because 1) it was largely my inspiration and 2) if you have never read T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, you are sub-human. Here. http://www.allspirit.co.uk/coker.html Go make yourself whole.