This afternoon I read T. S. Eliot's "East Coker," which was written in London during a time of national crisis (WW2). At this point in his life, Eliot saw society as becoming less rooted in the past and becoming more and more fragmented and chaotic, and he believed the only answer for society was Christianity.

Eliot knew that the key to giving modern society a sense of meaning involved re-gaining a deep respect for the past. Eliot believed that for the current generation to see themselves as completely on their own was supreme arrogance. We are always standing on the shoulders of our ancestors, and the desire to throw their wisdom away is utter foolishness.

I love these lines near the end of the poem:

     There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
     And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
     That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
     For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

     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 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.