Hope in the Waste Land

Today I find myself unable to get the cogitative cogs working. The mechanism of the mind is rather bogged down in the morass of malaise, despite a good ham sandwich, wholegrain cereal with maple syrup and pecans, and strong coffee. And so I turn to T. S. Eliot.

Thomas Stearns Eliot will always be remembered for his long and symbol-laden exegesis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, The Waste Land. But despite his many entropic writings and the sense of ruin, of disorder, and general hand-wringing at the state of the cosmos that many readers sense, he was also capable of steely hope and vigorous faith.

In his Choruses from 'The Rock', Eliot crafted many memorable lines about faith in the urban wasteland, the wasteland of human aspirations and dry communities. It is to these lines I turn when the world seems too burdensome. Have a taste:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will.
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Against the night-blindness of the daily Christian, the world-weariness and the stench of stupidity, there are few defences. For we who believe, the ultimate bulwark is the complex and sometimes unyielding mass of the Scriptures. But occasionally, a poet sheds light into the Waste Land; occasionally a watchman peers alertly into the gloom.

Today I find myself inspired to think and to write, and to do it this time in memory of yet another of those guardians of the waste, the late William Fitzjames Oldham, who was with us from 17 December 1854 to 27 March 1937, before he walked joyfully into that good light.