T. S. Eliot connection

In your course given in New York July 30 I was struck by your quoting T.S.Eliot at the outset, not only because he is a guru of mine but also because much of your material resonates in passages from Four Quartets. The passage that leapt out at me is from Little Gidding:

“… And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together) …”

A linguistic analog of the perfect presentation, but without the graphics. And yet the graphical element is almost always implicit, as in this passage from Burnt Norton:

“… daylight,
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence …”

Eliot seems to have an intuitive grasp of how to pack information into an observation (“The detail of the pattern is movement …”) while spreading out the observation as if unrolling a scroll (11 x 17 if you please) for our perusal. One can find examples of each of your principles in practically every phrase and sentence:

Comparison: ” … neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline …”

Causality: ” … a partial fallacy Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.”

Multivariate: metaphor, meter, hyperlink, history, location

Integration: ” … the complete consort dancing together … ”

Content: ” … history is now and England … ”

Observations arrayed, not stacked: “The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors …”

And above all, the music, which carries us along the journey of discovery (” … while the narrowing rails slide together behind you, and on the deck of the drumming liner, watching the furrow that widens behind you …”).

So I do not think the reference to Eliot (“Time present and time past …”) was purely accidental. And regarding his apparent preoccupation with religion, I don’t see it as any different from, say, a belief in the theories of relativity or the big bang. It’s a matter of faith in some unifying principle.

Dennis