The first time I read T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" (the last and best known of his Four Quartets) was not when up to a few moments ago I thought I had read it. I remembered it as an epigram in a novel that made a deep impression on me in the late 1970s, when I was in my late twenties. John Fowles's Daniel Martin (1977) turned me into a serious reader, although I've been a gluttonous reader since I was a child. At the time I first read Daniel Martin, I was a scruffy political activist winging my way through classes at San Francisco State University. I was not a good student. For reasons having to do with my schooling and my home life, I did not acquire the discipline or the focus academic success required. Feeling certain I belonged there but aware that I had no clue how to study, I stumbled through the portals of public higher education. I chose French literature as my major out of a desire to speak another language. Rabelais, Molière, Racine (C'est Venus toute entière à sa proie attachée burrowed into my brain for metrical rather than libidinal reasons), Voltaire, and eighteenth-century essayists fascinated me in the fleeting seconds my attention span allowed me to settle on their lines. As I subsequently learned, reading completes only half the task of learning to think; learning to write finishes the job. I didn't learn the second half of the task until I entered graduate school, far too late to make me a systematic thinker without the aid of a pen but a thinker nonetheless.
Perhaps because it filled an emotional vacuum, I was able to concentrate far more easily, indeed deeply, on my extracurricular reading -- Fowles, James Baldwin, Doris Lessing. They lured me away from my studies. Especially Fowles. Fowles brought out a visceral reaction in me. When I finished reading The Magus, I threw it across the room before I knew what I was doing. I've never done that since. The French Lieutenant's Woman excited the crossword-puzzle doer in me, trying to keep track of the different planes of narrative time. Fowles set out his character Daniel Martin's story in a way that was easier to follow and I followed it closely. Daniel connects with Jane in his youth, but he's not ready for her. He needs to mature, so the story follows him as he moves from Britain to Hollywood and back, where he find Jane once again. Then he is ready to embark on the longue durée of intimacy. More than a redemption story, Daniel Martin awoke in me a bittersweet sense of homecoming or rather home-longing, the yearning for a place that I left and forgot. I read the novel again fairly quickly. Now that I have learned that no epigram of Eliot's appears in the novel, I am fascinated at this oblique glimpse of my young psyche. I can only suppose that I first read "Little Gidding" around the time I was reading Fowles and somehow recognized a connection. Or maybe I read in some other piece that Fowles used it as his theme. However it was that I came to associate Daniel Martin and the last two stanzas of "Little Gidding," the connection is more meaningful to me today than it was in the past. I fear Fowles's novel will not hold up to another reading, but Eliot's does, even though I perceive a little better the piety in his poetry. The emotion of rediscovery wells up in me when I reflect on his imagery. It's the same emotion I hope to explore in these pages.
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 on in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Perhaps because it filled an emotional vacuum, I was able to concentrate far more easily, indeed deeply, on my extracurricular reading -- Fowles, James Baldwin, Doris Lessing. They lured me away from my studies. Especially Fowles. Fowles brought out a visceral reaction in me. When I finished reading The Magus, I threw it across the room before I knew what I was doing. I've never done that since. The French Lieutenant's Woman excited the crossword-puzzle doer in me, trying to keep track of the different planes of narrative time. Fowles set out his character Daniel Martin's story in a way that was easier to follow and I followed it closely. Daniel connects with Jane in his youth, but he's not ready for her. He needs to mature, so the story follows him as he moves from Britain to Hollywood and back, where he find Jane once again. Then he is ready to embark on the longue durée of intimacy. More than a redemption story, Daniel Martin awoke in me a bittersweet sense of homecoming or rather home-longing, the yearning for a place that I left and forgot. I read the novel again fairly quickly. Now that I have learned that no epigram of Eliot's appears in the novel, I am fascinated at this oblique glimpse of my young psyche. I can only suppose that I first read "Little Gidding" around the time I was reading Fowles and somehow recognized a connection. Or maybe I read in some other piece that Fowles used it as his theme. However it was that I came to associate Daniel Martin and the last two stanzas of "Little Gidding," the connection is more meaningful to me today than it was in the past. I fear Fowles's novel will not hold up to another reading, but Eliot's does, even though I perceive a little better the piety in his poetry. The emotion of rediscovery wells up in me when I reflect on his imagery. It's the same emotion I hope to explore in these pages.
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 on in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
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