T.S. Eliot and Four Quartets: The Wisdom Way

I
Introduction  

Eliot and the Fragmented West

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is

my beginning.                      

T.S. Eliot

“East Coker”

Four Quartets  

T.S. Eliot emerged as a poetic, literary, religious and philosophic presence after the carnage and tragedy of WWI—some called this the “lost generation”. Such a period of time was aptly summed up by Hemingway in his classic novel, The Moveable Feast”, or Yeats not to be forgotten or ignored poem, The Second Coming– such memorable lines as “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity” or “the centre cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” warning messages inscribed on the wall of our culture and civilization. I could also mention Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain as a symptom of the same dissipated ideological ethos. The West had, increasingly so, lost any notion of what it meant to be human, the core and centre imploded, fragmentation and identity politics the norm. How were the most sensitive and insightful to navigate the inclement weather and find some shoreline and land to think and live a more human, humane, good and just society in which some agreed about centre opposed the anarchy that, again and again, dynamited any notion of the common good? In short what did it mean to care for, tend and love what it meant to be human, or, to be philanthropic?  What the sad consequences of those who know not such a wisdom way?