Wanted to post, partly just to write it down. In reading T.S. Eliot's letters, I found this thought which I found so beautiful, in a letter that he wrote to his mother on 30 December 1917. This was about a family album of photographs that his brother Henry had taken and sent to him, and he and Vivien had had delightful time looking at the pictures and showing them to friends.
"It gives one a strange feeling that Time is not before and after, but all at once, present and future and all the periods of the past, an album like this."
Was it partly thoughts like this that came back to Eliot's mind much later in the early 1930's, when he wrote the first lines of Burnt Norton - not so much in the meaning of the lines but how to express them?
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past
Also, in East Coker, there is:
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
I suppose at least a part of the reason why Eliot's thought about the photograph album so delighted me is my own passion for photography.
3 comments:
"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past" - this is my favorite.
I am a fan of time travel, and this is a quote I apparently have heard elsewhere and not know it to be T.S. Eliot.
They are quite beautiful lines, aren't they? What impresses me so much is how much time people took back then to write letters. So different than the hurried lives we seem to lead now.
My favourite line of Eliot's is about daring to disturb the universe. To which I always want to say, why yes, of course.
xx
AM
Anne-Marie: that line's so beautiful as well, about daring to disturb the universe, from Prufrock. I agree with you completely: everyone should disturb the universe as much as possible!
I think people have sort of forgotten how to write letters properly, now. It seems too slow for the modern hectic life.
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