Splendid Formation

https://www.libertyfund.org/250th/american-ambitions/?mc_cid=cdbe05e47d -content

FOUR QUARTETS

T.S. Eliot

LITTLE GIDDING
(No. 4 of 'Four Quartets')

I

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

II

Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the w**d.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
Both one and many; in the brown baked features
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
Although we were not. I was still the same,
Knowing myself yet being someone other—
And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
And so, compliant to the common wind,
Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
I may not comprehend, may not remember.'
And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.

III

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

IV

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

V

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. 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)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Saint Augustine on Time and Eternity: A Restless Soul’s Vision of the Eternal Now

In Confessions Book XI, Augustine invites us into one of the most beautiful meditations ever written on time and God’s eternity.

He begins with humble honesty:
“What is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is, but if someone asks me to explain it, I find myself at a loss for words.”

For us humans, time is a distension of the soul — stretched between memory of the past and expectation of the future, leaving us fragmented and restless in a present that constantly slips away.

Yet for God, there is only the perfect, unchanging Eternal Now:
“In eternity nothing passes away, but the whole is present… Your today is eternity.”

Our scattered, temporal lives are lovingly held within His timeless presence. Time itself is a creature — a gift from the Eternal One.
This truth brings such peace. Our restlessness is not meaningless, but a holy homesickness calling us home.

A Gentle Audio Companion For a soothing narration of these ideas: Fall Asleep to Augustine’s Philosophy & Theology by Sleepy Philosophy.
https://youtu.be/JWKYYfQY3uA?si=pIH2rLQGGpiq2FTl

Full text in Confessions Book XI: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/schaff-a-select-library-of-the-nicene-and-post-nicene-fathers-of-the-christian-church-vol-1

What stirs in your heart when you reflect on time and eternity? 💛

A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Vol. 1 | Online Library of Liberty This volume contains St. Augustine’s famous “Confessions” and numerous letters.

Martin Luther's Interpretation of Repentance (from his Explanation of the Ninety-five Theses, 1518, commenting on Thesis 1)

"I wish to clarify this thesis for the benefit of those who may be misinformed, beginning with the Greek term 'metanoeite' itself. This term, commonly translated as 'repent,' more accurately corresponds to the Latin 'transmentamini,' which denotes a change in one's way of thinking and feeling, a recovery of one's understanding, a transition from one mental state to another, and a fundamental alteration of spirit.

As a result, individuals who were previously preoccupied with worldly matters may now achieve spiritual comprehension, as stated by the Apostle Paul in Romans 12:2, 'Be transformed by the renewal of your mind.' This restoration of one's understanding leads to a profound change of heart in the one who has erred, fostering a dislike for their past wrongdoings."

In this explanation, Luther subtly reintroduces the profound essence of the Gospel: repentance is not merely a series of outward actions, but rather a profound, transformative renewal of one's intellect and emotions—a reorientation that encourages a closer relationship with the Divine.

🏛
Aristotle’s Ten Categories
(from his work Categories, ~350 BC — part of the Organon)
🥀
Aristotle created these ten basic ways of describing anything that exists or can be talked about. It’s a straightforward framework that became a foundation for clear thinking, logic, and philosophy lasting more than two thousand years.

Here they are, with their original Greek and Latin names:

1. Substance (ousia / substantia) — What a thing essentially is (a human, a tree, a horse).

2. Quantity (poson / quantitas) — How much or how many (size, number, length).

3. Quality (poion / qualitas) — What kind or characteristic (color, shape, virtue).

4. Relation (pros ti / relatio) — How it relates to something else (double, father, knowledge of).

5. Place (pou / ubi) — Where it is (in the marketplace, in Athens).

6. Time (pote / quando) — When it exists or happens (yesterday, next year).

7. Position (keisthai / situs) — Orientation or posture (sitting, standing, lying down).

8. State (echein / habitus) — What it possesses or is wearing (armed, shod, having a cloak).

9. Action (poiein / actio) — What it is doing (cutting, burning, healing).

10. Passion (paschein / passio) — What is being done to it (being cut, being burned, being healed).

A simple yet useful idea from ancient Greece that still helps bring order to our thinking today.

Something interesting found at Liberty Fund
How curious, he was called a humanist and a Catholic Priest. The writing is lovely. The imagined speaker is Peace.

Interesting to learn that:
"At the time of Erasmus (late 15th–early 16th century), being called a “humanist” had a very specific, positive, and scholarly meaning — quite different from today’s usage.
In the Renaissance, a humanist was a scholar and educator who devoted himself to the studia humanitatis — the “studies of humanity” or the humanities. This curriculum centered on the recovery and teaching of classical Greek and Roman literature, language, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy."

The Complaint of Peace
Desiderius Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466 – 1536), also known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, theologian, and scholar who became one of the most influential intellectuals of his time.

The Complaint of Peace | Online Library of Liberty The Reformation scholar Desiderius Erasmus portrays Peace visiting to earth to deliver her verdict on the human race. She chastises kings and princes, church leaders, noblemen and ordinary soldiers alike for betraying their Christian values by waging unjust and unnecessary wars. “This translation ...

Easy on the ears! Excellent synopsis of the works by Augustine!

Fall Asleep to Augustine of Hippo's Complete Philosophy and Theology | Faith, Reason & Grace Tonight on Sleepy Philosophy, we’re resting in the gentle wisdom of Augustine of Hippo — one of history’s greatest minds in Christian philosophy and theology...

🥀 Your mind is worth it! (Link to Video Series in Comments)

Podcast Series:

A recap of Michael Munger's podcast exploration of Wealth of Nations on the book's 250th anniversary.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was first published on March 9, 1776 and was widely available by July of that year.

In honor of the book's 250th anniversary, AdamSmithWorks joined with Michael Munger of Duke University to present an in-depth background, analysis, and assessment of The Wealth of Nations. The book sought to explain the sources of prosperity in commercial societies and remains foundational for modern economics. Over ten episodes, this podcast series traces Smith’s argument from its intellectual roots in the Scottish Enlightenment to its continuing relevance in contemporary economic debates.

www.adamsmithworks.org {"version":"https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1","title":"Speaking of Smith | Adam Smith Works","home_page_url":"https://www.adamsmithworks.org/speakings","feed_url":"https://www.adamsmithworks.org/speakings.json","description":"The Speaking of Smith blog is the home of brief and lively exploration of....

🥀 Syllogism
— from the Greek "syllogismos," meaning a reckoning all together, or in Latin "syllogismus" — is a form of deductive reasoning that connects ideas step by step to reach a necessary conclusion.

It starts with a general statement (major premise), adds a specific one (minor premise), and draws a clear result from them.

Shakespeare uses this structure effectively in his play Timon of Athens.
In Act IV, Scene 3, Flavius asks Timon if he has forgotten him. Timon replies:
"Why dost ask that?
I have forgot all men;
Then, if thou grant’st thou’rt a man,
I have forgot thee."

Here is the syllogism laid out plainly:
Major premise: All men are men that Timon has forgotten.
Minor premise: Flavius is a man.
Conclusion: Therefore, Flavius is a man that Timon has forgotten (i.e., Timon has forgotten Flavius).

The logic is tight and valid on its own terms, yet it carries dramatic weight.

Timon, once generous and now embittered by betrayal, uses cold reasoning to push away a loyal friend.
It highlights how logic can serve emotion — here, isolation and despair — revealing the limits of pure deduction when human bonds are at stake.

Syllogisms like this sharpen our thinking in literature and life: they show when an argument holds firm and when it reveals deeper truths beyond the surface.

🥀❤️ The expression "wand'ring bark" refers to a vessel that is adrift or has deviated from its intended course, with "bark" traditionally signifying a small sailing ship.