Several attempts to post this juxtaposition of texts weaving and interweaving themes of time and eternity, love and death, have been frustrated by deletions, defacements, obstructions of various kinds. Unfortunately, the spacing has been altered in the T.S. Eliot poem that opens this collection of materials. Perhaps other alterations or damage of this work may be expected. I will complete the collection, asking for the reader's pardon, while hoping that my intended or suggested meaning will be conveyed -- despite these attacks -- to the intelligent student of these texts. This is the third time that I will type this work. You may wish to copy this post immediately after it appears. Daily attempts to obstruct my writing efforts making use of N.J. government computers must be expected at all times.
November 13, 2007 calls from 818-870-8140 at 9:25 A.M.; at 12:17 P.M. from 480-000-0000 (what an unusual number, N.J. police?); at 12:38 P.M. from 425-648-9413. New "errors" inserted at 9:47 P.M. I have done my best to correct them. November 14, 2007 at 10:35 A.M. calls (probably just a coincidence) from 610-915-5214. (OAE?) I am blocking:
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90xWBCBRB00110msn/direct;wi.728;hi.90/01
Burnt Norton
by
T.S. Eliot
I
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
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.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained 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,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
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.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
"To my friend, E___ R____, this unworthy volume is respectfully dedicated."
F.H. Bradley, T.S. Eliot's tutor at Oxford and subject of the American poet's dissertation in philosophy at Harvard, attached this enigmatic dedication to his masterpiece Appearance and Reality (New York: MacMillan, 1897), where the following paragraph is found at page 41:
"For any process admitted destroys the 'now' from within. Before and after are diverse, and their incompatibility compels us to use a relation between them. Then at once the old wearisome game is played again. The aspects become parts, the 'now' consists of 'nows,' and in the end these 'nows' prove undiscoverable. For, as a solid part of time, the 'now' does not exist. Pieces of duration may to us appear not to be composite; but a very little reflection lays bare their inherent fraudulence. If they are not duration, they do not contain an after and before, and they have, by themselves, no beginning or end, and are by themselves outside of time. But, if so, time becomes merely the relation between them; and duration is a number of relations of the timeless, themselves also, I suppose, related somehow so as to make one duration." (emphasis added)
Bradley's final work published in his lifetime (the Aphorisms, which I do not own, appeared in 1933, after Bradley's death) is entitled Essays On Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914). The dedication to this book, is also for "E___ R___":
"To the friend without whose unfailing sympathy its defects would have been even greater this volume is dedicated."
In this final collection of essays, Bradley says:
"In philosophy we must not seek for an absolute satisfaction. Philosophy at its best is but an understanding of its object, and it is not an experience in which that object is contained wholly and possessed. It is the exercise and employment, in other words, of but one side of our nature. I do not forget that philosophy" -- or science? -- "has often been made into a religion. From time to time it has been taken as the one thing needful, as the end and rule of our lives, and as all the world to its worshippers. But the same thing, we must remember, would be true again of art and perhaps of other pursuits. It must be an unhappy world where a man can say that, if he had no philosophy, he would be destitute of practical belief. ... A true philosophy cannot justify its own apotheosis. ... Philosophy demands, and in the end it rests on, what may fairly be termed faith." (pp. 13-15.) (emphasis added) (Compare "Beauty and the Beast" with "Tales of the Forest of Arden.")
"Because such equations have no intrinsic arrow of time, there is no reason to choose one direction in time in preference to the other. But things are worse still: not only is time undirected, it should be cyclic and 'history' must repeat in keeping with Poincarre's return. Just as a circle has no end, so this eternal return appears to rule out the existence of a beginning and an ending of time."
Peter Coveney & Roger Highfield, The Arrow of Time (New York: Fawcett, 1990), p. 261 (science).
"This difficulty, and lingering inconsistencies at the heart of quantum theory itself, have convinced a growing number of researchers that something deeper is going on behind the scenes -- a 'pre-quantum' world of certainties and objective realities [Deus Principle?] which, once understood, might reveal how the strange rules of quantum physics emerge from something less strange. A few are starting to think they are starting to see its tantalising outlines."
Compare my forthcoming essay: "Umberto Eco, David Deutsch: The Universe, Multiverse, and the Hermeneutics of Freedom." I fully expect destruction or damaging of that essay on the first few postings of it, then more damage at irregualr intervals thereafter. My memoir in the form of novel could not be written at this computer. I am trying to find a way to continue working on it. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
"The proofs of unavoidable quantum weirdness centre [sic.] on entanglement, the spooky quantum link that Einstein found so distateful. Entangled pairs of particles such as photons are routinely created in the lab for all kinds of experiments. Send a photon into a 'non-linear' crystal and a pair of entangled photons emerge whose characteristics are mysteriously linked. According to quantum theory, it makes no sense to talk about the properties of just one of the entangled photons that appears from the crystal, since all of the information about the photons -- such as their 'up' or 'down' spin rates -- lies only in their joint properties. Such photons remain connected, even over vast distances ... [whether spacial or temporal distances is irrelevant.]"
Mark Buchanan, "Quantum Unentanglement," in New Scientist, November 3-9, 2007, at p. 37. (The mysterious connection -- in what? -- is the third term in which it is possible for relations to exist, the Absolute, uni- or multiverse.)
The word "entangled" was altered in the foregoing quotation. I have now corrected it three times. I expect to correct the word again the next time that I read this post. December 13, 2007 at 3:25 P.M.
"Bradley regarded philosophy as the intellectual means of adjusting oneself to the universe, of trying to see things steadily and whole; and for him such a search was both speculative and religious. He would have considered as visionless and molelike the preoccupation of some contemporary analysts with making distinctions within distinctions for their own sake, without any view to their wider bearings on the world and man's place in it. ... Many persons have wondered who the mysterious [E.R.] was to whom Appearance and Reality was dedicated. She was in fact a French woman, married to an American engineer [only one new "error" since my last reading!] who seems not to have minded the attachment to his wife of an eminent foreign philosopher. ... Many years later, at Bradley's funeral, there appeared an unknown lady, dressed and veiled in black, who disappeared as quietly as she had come. It was [Bradley's love,] arrived from France for a last salute to a friend whose affection, if not his greatness, she could understand."
Brand Blanshard, "Autobiography," in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard (Illinois: Open Court, 1980), pp. 26-27. (The foregoing paragraph has been damaged repeatedly by hackers from New Jersey -- "eppur si muove ...")
I have long hoped to write a short story describing a final meeting between Bradley and his French lady.
"My poor Charles, search your heart -- you thought when you came to this city, did you not, to prove to yourself you were not yet in the prison of your future. But escape is not one act, my friend. It is no more achieved by that than you could reach Jerusalem from here by one small step. Each day, Charles, each hour, it has to be taken again. Each minute the nail waits to be hammered in. You know your choice. You stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honor, self-respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or you are free and crucified. Your only companions the stones, the thorns, the turning backs; the silence of cities, and their hate."
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (New York: Signet, 1970), p. 264. (Free and Crucified? Or Sated Slave? Neo? Or Cypher?)
Carlos Fuentes says:
"Some time ago, I was traveling in the state of Morelos in central Mexico, looking for the birthplace of Emiliano Zapata, the village of Anenecuilco. I stopped and asked a campesino, a laborer of the fields, how far it was to that village. He answered: 'If you had left at daybreak, you would be there now.' [Not all of us in life have the chance to leave at daybreak.] This man had an internal clock which marked his own time and that of his culture. For the clocks of all men and women, of all civilizations, are not set at the same hour. One of the wonders of our menaced globe is the variety of its experiences, its memories, and its desire. Any attempt to impose a uniform politics on this diversity is like a prelude to death."
"A Harvard Commencement," in Myself With Others (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1988), p. 199. (Can Democracy be exported?)
Chang Tung-sun, the Chinese Kantian-Bergsonian-Confucian, writes:
"In place of the categories, ... there are 'postulates' which [Chang Tung-sun] said are identical with Schiller's 'methodological assumptions' ... These are not entirely a priori, since they are within the realm of experience. There are, however, three postulates that are a priori. The first is 'the basic laws of logic,' that is, the laws of thought. The second includes space and time as forms, which are the a priori in intuition. ..."
Wing-tsit Chan, "Philosophies of China," in D.D. Runes, ed., Twentieth Century Philosophy: Living Schools of Thought (New York: Greenwood, 1968), p. 553. ("Gravity is the root of lightness." -- Lao-tzu.)
Sonnet 64
by
William Shakespeare
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich, proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometimes lofty towers I see down-rased
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day
by
Delmore Schwartz
Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
( ...that time is the fire in which they burn.)
Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where they are now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
