Escape From Plato's Cave

Four Quartets as a Motivational Text

We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion …
In my end is my beginning.

What a superb set of lines from T.S. Eliot in East Coker, the second of his Four Quartets. These interlocking poems – Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942) – are choc-full with top class lines: ‘The surface glittered out of heart of light’, ‘The wild thyme unseen’, ‘music heard so deeply that it is not music at all’, ‘And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier.’ The list goes on.

So Four Quartets is an enjoyable and essential work of art on that level alone. These lines stay with you. They ferment. They marinate. They well up into the light of consciousness on the most unexpected and timely of occasions, bringing comfort and hope when most needed. The poems can also be read for their theological and philosophic content and much has been said about these aspects since their publication. But I want to look at Eliot’s masterwork from the angle of a motivational text – something that can help us here and now make sense of who we are and where we are and how we might move forward and through  – ‘farther up and farther in’, in C.S. Lewis’s phrase – in a world which appears to be falling apart at the seams.

In the last piece I wrote in this series, back in May, I reflected on the eternal value of The Aeneid and the story of Aeneas’s recovery and triumph from the ruins of Troy to the foundations of Rome. But it was easier for Aeneas in some respects than it is for us today, trying as we are to navigate a contemporary scene full of confusion and discordance. Aeneas already knew what his mission and purpose in life was before he set out. His mother, the goddess Venus, told him exactly what he needed to do and where he needed to go and Aeneas was able to use this as a springboard to create facts on the ground. Though he veered from his path at times and was laid low by misfortune and temptation, he always had that North Star to pull him back and set him on the straight and narrow again.

Four Quartets, though written nearly two thousand years later than, in a sense comes before The Aeneid in that it gives us orientation and gets our inner compass working. It’s a voyage to a beginning. Because if we don’t know who we are or where we’re going, we’re not going to get anywhere at all. It’ll be ever decreasing circles all the way down.

What’s important, what’s really crucial, is what Eliot names ‘the still point’ – a centre of calm certitude at the heart of each one of us and also at the heart of the cosmos – the opposite of fragmentation, a place of unity and coherence. ‘The still point of the turning world’, he calls it:

Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. (Burnt Norton)

But how to get there from where we are now? That’s the hard part. That’s where we need to take a good long look at ourselves. What do we see there? Many sins and failings and wrong-turnings, no doubt. Maybe worse. We have to acknowledge all that, feel the weight and futility of it, accept it, offer it up, and step forward in faith and love. We are who we are and we are where we are and we have to take that as our base camp. It’s a tough road, this part:

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not. (East Coker)

So the way up is the way down; the way out is the way through. As Eliot tells us in Little Gidding, we can only be ‘redeemed from fire by fire.’ Sometimes we’re so far lost and so deeply asleep that we can only be scorched back into life; burnt back into Being. This is the confrontation with the Self – the Dweller on the Threshold – and it costs nothing less than everything.

What happens next then? Once the débris is cleared away? This is where we start putting building blocks for the future in place by asking ourselves a series of rigourous but constructive questions: Who am I really? Not as my ego would like me to be or how the ‘great and the good’ would like me to be but who I actually, truly am. What did I like doing as a child? Could I do that again now? What is my deepest desire? What am I all about? What do I stand for? What do I care about? To what extent have I ever become ‘the real me’? Do I even know who that is? To what extent has that person been swamped and silenced by the dictates of society? How do I slough off all the false selves I have accrued over the years? Where do I come from? Who are my ancestors? What did they believe in? What, if anything, did they fight and die for and how does that apply to me now? Who are my people, historically speaking? What part do I play in the continuum between time past, time present and time future?

This last question is key for Eliot. ‘A people without history’, he reminds us:

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. (Little Gidding)

‘Now and England.’ In other words, where you are now and right this very moment. This is where things start to happen, what Eliot calls ‘the point of intersection of the timeless with time.’ A space has been made, a clearing created for grace and goodness to enter our lives, ‘a white light still and moving … both a new world and the old one made explicit.’ (Burnt Norton)

This is where the good stuff begins. In Dantean terms, we have crawled out of Hell and clambered up Mount Purgatory and are now ready for lift off into Paradise, into a world full of pattern, significance, purpose and value. We have divested ourselves of so many harmful accretions and so many layers of falsity and are now facing the right way round, towards the Sun. Whatever the outer circumstances, there is something unshakeable in us now. It’s a platform to greatness. We have left the illusions of Plato’s Cave behind and are surging forth towards the light and the stillness and the dancing. That’s where the music is and that’s where you are too, here and in eternity. ‘England and nowhere. Never and always’:

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. (Little Gidding)

It's such rich stuff all this, it really is. It’s a lifetime’s work, in truth, reading and reflecting on Four Quartets. But give it just three months – a few lines every day – and you will see a difference, I promise you. It’ll take you from whatever state you’re in now – relatively content maybe, or mired in passivity/mediocrity, or just a total smashed up mess – ‘a heap of broken images’ as TSE says in The Wasteland. It’ll take you from there and bring you closer – so that you can touch it, taste it and smell it – to the power and glory and splendour  of who you really are, of who you were made to be, of who you will inevitably become now that the gunk has been cleared and you are pointing the right way. In this world and the next. Now and forever. ‘Before the beginning and after the end’ as Eliot writes in Burnt Norton.

Where ‘all is always now.’