Term Paper.

I am supposedly going to present my paper today, we'll see if that happens. Sorry about the lack of basic formatting in the paper below, I don't have time to recreate all the paragraph breaks. Sorry, gotta run. Good luck to everyone who is going to present or is currently writing their papers!




The hour's NOW come; The very minute bids thee ope thine ear.
I think we would all be better off with a healthy dose of skepticism concerning the commanding finality of the clock. Mine started a couple years ago, and I remember looking, fruitlessly, for alternatives to my linear concepts of time. At first I found relatively little, mainly snippets of String Theory and references to obscure Eastern thought. I knew there must be more out there, but the ever revolving hands, as so often happens, dulled the edge of my inquiry and brushed the topic aside. Pesky mechanism, always thwarting my endeavors! But alas, this is not a paper in which I denounce the chronometer, for that would be a paradox, which is certainly not useless but might confuse the aims of this argument. Eliot's use of paradox is not, shall I say, stingy and two people using this technique in such close proximity might only manage to conjure up a mass of uncorrelatable matter. This is a risk I'm not willing to take at the moment.
Definition: At the Moment: A phrase created by Time's division of propaganda in order to establish one's relative relation on the vector of Time (called a “Time-line”) and to mask the essence of the true, eternal moment. This is also achieved through the colloquial, and sloppy, use of the word “now.” From this relative point in time on, I must treat the use of the word “now” with utmost care. Eliot makes me.
In the opening lines of Burnt Norton, Eliot creates his first paradox. “If all time is eternally present // All time is unredeemable.” The problems that arise out of this sentiment are based off of notions of time and eternity, which occur throughout the Four Quartets. In his essay entitled, “Time, Eternity, and Immortality in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets,” Terry Fairchild makes an important distinction. “Time he [Eliot] says is not always present; it is eternally present. For time to be eternally present, it can have no temporal boundaries” (Fairchild 58). From the very beginning, Eliot sets about to define the point in time where time folds in upon itself, and where the depths of eternity exist. This difficult task is approached from this paradox. If eternity has, by definition and understanding, no temporal boundaries then its existence within time is impossible. Eliot attempts to dig to that point at which time is not time, but a dim reflection of itself staring into a mirror in Lisbon and sticking its ever maddening tongue out.
Time is also a boundary for consciousness according to Eliot. He says, “To be conscious is not to be in time,” and if consciousness is truth, then we must get to the point of eternity in order to wholly understand. This is an interesting intricacy in Eliot's philosophy of time. If time is a type of border line for our consciousness, then to break out of time would also effectively increase our consciousness. In that case, we as humans are imparted with enormous volumes of knowledge, to what extent we do not know, and the secret then lies in understanding how to gain access to those grand archives. In this vein, Eliot's philosophy is one of a gnostic bent, and he submits that the knowledge of the world is limited to us by the bonds of time.
Eliot makes this simple by saying, “All is always now.” He makes no distinctions about what is contained in the unsure “all.” It is not necessarily just knowledge that exists in the “intense moment isolated.” It could be everything in the broadest sense of the word, and even broader than our limited language will allow. This particular phrase is important, the words are simple but weigh heavy with implication.
Another important element of Eliot's philosophy of time is that love exists in the same manner as human consciousness. Love, according to Eliot, exists in perfection outside of the constraints of time. Outside the bounds of time, perfection in love and consciousness are seemingly achieved. Are these correlated? There is no possible way for me not to think so. Though “the detail of the pattern is movement,” and movement is time, the complicated pattern incorporates all, and “all is always now.” Surely, for Eliot, love and consciousness are infinitely related. And our version? Even within the limitation, love is saturated “Sudden in a shaft of sunlight // Even while the dust moves // There rises the hidden laughter // Of children in the foliage.” The children are there, but are only seen if we look. The warmth on our backs as we hike through the towering pine, and in the shaft of sunlight, filtered by clustered needles, what do we find?
For Eliot there are two types of moments. The moment isolated which I have discussed (that on a pinpoint of time contains the unimaginable vastness of eternity), and the moment made up of complicated patterns. In this type of moment, therein exists the whole of everything, not necessarily the ultra inclusive “all,” but at least the lifetimes of all mankind and “old stones that cannot be deciphered.” A beautiful line which gives a certain weight to material substance. Matter indeed matters.
“A lifetime burning in every moment.” Eliot introduces the ultimate twenty minute lifetime. It all exists in a moment. Not twenty minutes, but a moment, which is perhaps one of the most ambiguous terms related to time. It is difficult to destabilize one's thoughts around the concepts of time. When the existence of something is called into question apart from the structured context, I am nearly lost. How can my end exist alongside my beginning? The process is not easy, no one said it would be. Remember what the thrush said in the rose garden, “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind // Cannot bear very much reality.” Does this type of moment only exist to accommodate the material? I am not sure the distinction between the types of moments can be made so easily, though the perfection of love does seem to be of a different realm. Either way, the linearity of time is challenged, and any substantial disassociation with the clock might be advantageous to an understanding of non-linearity.

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is concurred.
(From Burnt Norton section II)

As I mentioned initially, I cannot create the paradox of wholly discounting time. This is because Eliot holds time and memory closely together. It is only through time that we can understand the intricacies of “now” because time makes memory possible. Later in Little Gidding, Eliot sums up that memory is used for liberation. This is a liberation from past and future by way of love, a love that supposedly seeks its perfected form. Therefore, we need time in order to advance passed any preconceived notions of time. It is only possible for me to write this paper with the help of the clock.
The ever ticking clock tells me, in a roundabout way that the earth is still slowly moving along its dismal course. Or its diurnal course, as some might say. With transient beauty so ephemeral, Eliot reminds us that there is something more. He is, in many ways, a Christian and a Modernist. Especially a Modernist. Through the Four Quartets, Eliot urges exploration and suggests the fruits of such a costly labor to be unimaginable gains and a truth that starts with a capitol 'T.'
From some relative position on the irrelevant scale of time, I must make the attempt to swerve from previous notions of linearity and the naïve use of “now.” That small word, so often used but so little understood. The implications of Eliot's philosophy are monstrous; the moment contains everything, and the moment isolated contains even the abysm of eternity. It is difficult to draw clear distinction between these moments in the Four Quartets, but maybe that is the point. It is surely not easy, and we must remember the words of the thrush. Remember, yes, we must remember now.







Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. Orlando: Harcourt, 1971. Print.
Fairchild, Terry L. “Time, Eternity, and Immortality in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.” Modern Science and Vedic Science 9.1 (1999): 50-99. Print.