On Beginnings and Endings
Looking over the last lines of T.S. Eliot’s fabled Four Quartets, the great masterwork on which his reputation rests, one sees in the final movement of the poem a striking reminder of that which we do well never to forget. It is the knowledge that, in this life certainly,
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.
What Eliot is trying to tell us, it seems to me, putting it in a less poetical fashion, is that the end will always be found in the beginning, and that when we finally do come to the end, it will have been granted to us so that once more we may return to the beginning. But not in a way we might have expected. That is because all too often, as Eliot says elsewhere in the poem,
We had the experience, but missed the meaning,
And approach
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