The Still Point of the Turning World
(Photo by Ignacio Correia 🔴 on Unsplash)
In the course of the vastly increased time I had for reading and personal study during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020 and 2021, I developed an interest in studying different perspectives on the nature and meaning of time.
I am not completely sure why this was. Whether it was a consequence of the different cadence the passage of time appeared to assume during the lockdown, or whether it had something to do with nearly inevitable comparisons between that particular stretch of time, with all of its unique particularities, and other ones which had come before, or whether it was simply something my mind latched onto as a topic of interest given adequate space and time to do so. Whatever the reason, this compelling interest led me, over the course of many months, to explore the question in ways I had not previously done, a process which led me to resources in some cases familiar (like T.S. Eliot) or, in my case, less so (like Henri Bergson or Eihei Dogen), in trying to come to grips with different perspectives which have passed in and out of vogue in different times and places.
This article is the first of a series which will explore some of the perspectives I have encountered in this journey through the human thought world that surrounds time. I’ve chosen to begin with an old favorite of mine, the modernist Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot, and in particular the views relating to time which he expressed in Burnt Norton, the first of the four poems that comprise his later collection known as The Four Quartets.
T.S. Eliot and The Four Quartets
Eliot lived in an era that was both very different, and yet at the same time eerily similar, to our own. Born in 1888, Eliot lived the prime of his life in a period of tremendous social, cultural and political upheaval — he was in his late twenties during the First World War, in his fifties during most of the Second World War, and lived well into the foundational period of our own era before passing in 1965. This period of time featured a heretofore unprecedented degree of cultural, economic and political change, particularly in Europe, where Eliot had chosen to live most of his adult life. In this sense, the time in which Eliot lived, while different from our own in numerous ways, was nonetheless very similar to ours in that it was an era of widespread, unprecedented change that was proceeding in (at the time) unpredictable directions, and which was accompanied by great amount of social and political disorder. Eliot’s times were, in many ways, a mirror of our own in a deep and fundamental sense, despite the many dissimilarities between life today and how it was a century ago.
Many of the themes of Eliot’s often difficult poems arose from these turbulent times, times in which an old order was slipping away and being quickly replaced with a new one that was as yet indeterminate in nature. Both experiences — the passing of an order, indeed the necessity of its passing, as well as the utterly disorienting experience of witnessing the birth, or the attempted birth, of a new order in real time, with all of the false starts, incoherencies, and dislocations implicit in that passage — formed the themes of many of Eliot’s earlier, more well-known works, such as The Waste Land or Prufrock.
As he approached mid-life, however, Eliot turned increasingly to a different perspective, one which was likely more informed by the totality of his life’s experiences up until then, which included a mid-life religious conversion to Anglican Christianity. One apparent result of this was the exquisite, yet challenging, collection of philosophical poems contained in The Four Quartets, which were written and published between 1936 and 1942. Burnt Norton (which refers to a country estate in the Cotswolds area of England) is the first of the sequence, and the one in which Eliot addresses most directly his thinking, at that point, on the nature and significance of time.
(Photo by Edson Rosas on Unsplash)
I will not attempt here an analysis of the poem in its fullness, taking into account its formal and thematic aspects. That’s something that is well beyond the scope of a Substack article, due both to the nature of Eliot’s poems in general, and the particular themes of the poems that comprise the Quartets. Instead, I will focus on one of the central themes of the poem only: the meaning and significance of time.
Ultimate Reality and Time
In summary, for Eliot, a kind of “ultimate reality” exists beyond time, and is timeless, yet this reality cannot be experienced by humanity other than through the lived experience of time, with all of its limitations.
The well-known opening meditation of Burnt Norton appears, at first blush, to imply that the present time is, in reality, the only time that truly exists:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
…
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
…
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Eliot here appears to echo sentiments expressed by Buddhist and other non-Western religious and philosophical thinkers (with whom Eliot was quite familiar by the time he wrote Burnt Norton) to the effect that only the present moment is, in fact, “real”. This is so because the past no longer exists in the present time, while the future is uncertain and does not yet exist in the present time, — meaning that the only reality that actually exists is the present moment. That present moment is always in the process of becoming past, and therefore passing from existence and, in a sense, no longer “real”, while at the same time the inchoate future — which, until it is “realized” in a particular present moment, always remains pregnant with alternative possibilities — is constantly being crystallized into a particular, and real, determined form in one actual, lived, particular, specific present moment.
A closer reading, however, reveals that Eliot is evoking something quite distinct from the present moment in time. The poet moves beyond a conception of the exclusive reality of the present moment to point towards a kind of eternal present which does not represent the present point in time, but is instead “one end, which is always present”, a point which is still amidst the movement of time — a point around which the phenomenal world, the march and flow of time and all that is contained within its great movement, revolves and turns but which, itself, is still:
At the still point of the turning world. 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.
As is generally the case with Burnt Norton, there is too much meaning and nuance of meaning for any one characterization to exhaust the semantic content, never mind the implications of the form itself. However, from the perspective of the lens of this particular reading, here Eliot emphasizes a central stillness, which is neither material nor immaterial and therefore is somehow beyond the material/immaterial distinction, which is placeless and directionless, but in which, and by virtue of which, all phenomenal, experienced, lived reality happens (“there the dance is … Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”).
The poem leaves open whether this reality refers to a God-like concept or person, or a quality inherent in the human person but which is not yet fully realized in life, or a place or experience outside of time in which all humanity participates or has participated in some not-well-understood way, or whether, in fact, the poem settles on any particular conception at all. In this sense I tend to agree with Peter Ackroyd, perhaps Eliot’s most well-known biographer, that Burnt Norton is, in many ways, an open-ended set of meditations and reflections, rather than pinned-down conclusions. However, those meditations do have a shape and a direction to them, open-ended as they may be, and I think that shape can be discerned with perhaps a bit more precision still.
A clue lies in Eliot’s pivot from that somewhat ambiguous still point to the more concrete level of individual experience:
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
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 is time conquered.
Here we see the contrast between the still point outside time’s movement, the source of the dance, of phenomenal reality, on the one hand, which Eliot here describes as “to be conscious”, and the diminished experience of phenomenal reality itself, which is described as “allow(ing) but a little consciousness”. In other words, the lived experience of phenomenal reality is only a small shadow of the fullness of consciousness that is available at the still point, which is outside the movement of time.
It is precisely this diminished consciousness and how it exists in, and is limited by, the experience of time’s movement, that serves as a precondition for memory. And the experience of remembering the past in time’s movement, which leads to an experience of anticipating the future potential for time’s movement, while experiencing the presence of both past and future in the lived reality of the present moment — this linked experience is the means by which “through time time is conquered”. That is, it is only through the lived experience of time, which must happen “from the inside out” (i.e., from inside time itself, with all of the diminished consciousness that this entails, and not from the “still point” outside of it), that time’s dominion over us can be alleviated, as with a passage from one stage to another, both the means and the terrain of which are the experience of lived time itself.
That passage is “a place of disaffection” for us. In the darkest part of the poem, Eliot reflects on the particular challenges and indignities of the emergent new way of life in early 20th Century London, taking them as a metaphor for the choking difficulties of life in the changing phenomenal world, and suggests, by means of another metaphor, the means by which these difficulties may be transcended:
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
…
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metaled ways
Of time past and time future.
The suggestion here is one of interior life, interior solitude and stillness (here “abstention from movement”, a kind of active stillness created by actively choosing to abstain). This actively chosen interior stillness is “the one way”, a way of descent, into solitude, into an interior self, which can be still “while the world moves in appetency, on its metaled ways of time past and time future”.
In other words, Eliot is is suggesting, by means of the metaphoric image of the London Underground, that the experience of the passage of time, which is a “place of disaffection”, can be transcended by descending into oneself and cultivating a world of interior stillness amidst one’s active life in the moving phenomenal world of time. This suggestion is reminiscent of meditation techniques of both Eastern and Western religious traditions, but it appears that the point is not to refer to any specific practice, but rather to a way of living in the phenomenal world of time — and particularly in an age of tremendous movement and change (in Eliot’s day as in our own) — while minimizing or mitigating the “disaffection” generated by that constant, grinding passage of time.
The consolations of art are available in the phenomenal world, but the central stillness cannot be described in the substance of words, or of art, which are too passing themselves in order to convey it effectively:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain …
Art’s forms convey the stillness, in its ever-presence, but the bare content within those forms — the actual words themselves rather than the words as expressed through the poetic form, for example, or the notes of a particular piece of music rather than those notes as expressed through the composed musical form — is not what conveys the stillness at the core of existence. Instead it is the words or the notes only as expressed in and through enduring forms which can do this: in a limited and imperfect, but nonetheless real, way, the enduring nature of the forms connects with the present expression of words and notes, and together they manifest the still point’s resonance in the present moment, a resonance which, from the perspective of that still point, is always occurring in the now. Here, again, art is serving as a metaphor for life, whereby the (apparently at any one point in time) enduring nature of the forms of life combines with the specific “notes” of one particular instance or person to manifest the still point together, as both enduring and specifically and uniquely present in this particular person, in this particular moment.
Eliot concludes his reflections on the nature and significance of time by means of a final contrast between desire and love. Desire is portrayed as movement, which belongs to the moving, phenomenal world of time, while love belongs to the unmoving timelessness of the still point:
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Eliot’s phrasing here has more or less clear religious overtones relating to his conversion to Anglicanism a few years prior to writing the poem, but the passage has a broader meaning as well, in that it refers to a way of being which is inherent to the lived-in-time experience. This phenomenal experience, lived by necessity in time and in the midst of its passage and flux, is one of desire and movement, with the proper end of that movement being love. Love is a gateway to the timeless, but it is experienced “in the aspect of time caught in the form of limitation between un-being and being” — in other words, while living a human life between un-being (prior to one’s specific coming into being) and being in its fullness, which, for Eliot at this time in his life, likely refers to a passage to union with the “still point”, which is outside time, and therefore beyond the lived-in-time phenomenal experience of life. For Eliot, love is the bridge, therefore — the means by which the timeless breaks through into the “form of limitation” which is the phenomenal world of time, in a way that is at once surprising, fresh, and definitive:
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always —
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
Here I read Eliot as expressing the experience of the timeless in the midst of lived-in-time life, as sudden and surprising glimpses of another reality, one which is not cramped by the phenomenal, time-bound world of experience, and yet which at the same time can only be glimpsed by us in and through that world of time and experience itself. This is something that makes the “sad time” that stretches in both directions — past and future — in the phenomenal world seem ridiculous to us by comparison. Paradoxically, however, this insight arises and is only accessible to us, time-bound as we are, from the perspective, and by means of the experience, of living inside time itself, of inhabiting the “form of limitation”, and the “disaffection” this implies, as expressed earlier in the poem.
In these reflections I do not mean to suggest something as banal as “this is what Eliot actually meant when he wrote Burnt Norton” or something similar. As I say above, I tend to agree with critics who have suggested that the poem is best read as an open-ended set of meditations on time, experience, spirituality, and a good number of other things as well. I offer my own reflections here as another window into the sometimes rich, sometimes ponderous, and always rewarding world of The Four Quartets in the hope that they may be useful or interesting in the context of your own readings and insights.
I plan to explore similar themes about the meaning and significance of time in the writings of other thinkers as an occasional series. On a parallel but separate track, I also plan to write further here about the other three poems of the Quartets, which share much in common with Burnt Norton but range into other interesting and related themes.