We are now on the verge of 2014 and as we contemplate the innate hope suggested by a fresh new year, why not think of a wonderful ‘talismanic’ quotation to accompany us along the way?
Everyone has a favourite song or remembered line or piece of poetry.
They are like friends. We return to them and often they seem to return to us, or to return ‘us’ to ourselves, whoever we may be ….
For words do accompany us through our lives, making sense and sometimes nonsense of what we experience and how we reflect upon our experience.
I studied T S Eliot years ago during my final year as an undergraduate student , and found him largely incomprehensible, but I can still recall reading this line from The Wasteland and knowing viscerally how profoundly TRUE!
‘‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’
Ironically only a few weeks later, I found Eliot’s words returning to me again, when out of the blue, my father died after a very short illness.
Of course Words do reveal their limitations when perhaps we most need them, but TS Eliot’s near final reflection on his private and public ‘wasteland’ of the soul, seems to grasp a truth that may help us to withstand our lives’chaos.
‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’
Whatever happens, we may find reassurance through some sort of ‘faith’ whether spiritual or secular: we may gather together bits and pieces of remembrance ; shards of emotion and connection, in order to try to make sense of futility and pain.
Remembrance reminds us of what matters and of what may finally survive us.
Eliot’s line reminds us to have faith in our world’s private and public connections, our soul’s enduring intimacies.
Life is fragile and brief and our ‘ruins’ are never far away, but our ‘fragments’ may nurture us, reconcile us to the inevitability of loss and may even tentatively heal us too.
As Mrs Ramsay acknowledges in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, as she too collects up her fragments, through her final tender, gathering glance at her extended family, all about to be devastated by the first World War:
‘Of such moments…the thing is made that remains for ever after. This would remain.’
Happy 2014!
