types of now in Four Quartets

Spending time with this poem is great. I have read it, and reread it, and underlined, and reunderlined. I have probably been cover to cover nine times and reread certain passages over and over. And yet, I have barely scratched the surface. I have never spent this much time with a single work of Literature. I always have imagined it to be daunting and stressful, but it is quite the opposite, I greatly enjoy the pensive stillness that Eliot's words contain.

Before this afternoon, I thought I knew what Eliot's "now" meant. No longer. In East Coker (V) I stumbled, again, into this passage.

from East Coker Section V

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

Up until this point (and mainly throughout Burnt Norton) I have been focusing on just that, the intense moment isolated, with no before and after. This intense moment, the one where eternity exists, the one where the dance occurs is identified by an element, which Eliot identifies as Love.

Love is itself unmoving

Time is movement, and the moment isolated essentially contains eternity. Just as the pattern of the boarhound and the boar is reconciled among the stars, so too is the dance, in the artery, in the evening, assuaged under the starlight. Maybe that is the wrong way to put it. One must try multiple ways, multiple times.

But there is also the moment that is every pattern, overlain, a never ending cross-reference, I am just a visitor and yes, I trip. This is the evening underneath the glow of the lamplight, the memories, connections, and patterns come from the album, more than the life of just one.

And here I have to deal with these last lines

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

It is the word 'now' that bothers me. Is Eliot using it with the utmost care here? How do I take this? Is this the now of the starlight or the now of the lamplight? In keeping with Eliot's ideas of time and Love I am inclined to think that when the patterns fall away, love remains. The eternity of the evening under starlight. There is love.


I still feel inept in the intricacies of now.

Closer
maybe closer
I'll be tomorrow