A Favorite Passage
November 7th, 2004 | by Craig |From The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot.
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
One Response to “A Favorite Passage”
By Gman on Nov 9, 2004 | Reply
Haven’t read much of T.S. Eliot’s poetry, but Russell Kirk has lauded the man in his writings on political philosophy and history. In fact, one of Russell’s book is “Eliot and His Age.” A few quotes of Eliot’s that I picked up from Kirk’s “Politics of Prudence”:
“For the question of questions, which no political philosophy can escape, and by the right answer to which all political thinking must in the end be judged, is simply this: What is man? what are his limitations? what is his misery and what his greatness? and what, finally, his destiny?”
“Men who have stopped thinking make a powerful force.”
“I do not believe the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren; and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.”
“As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality.” from “The Idea of a Christian Society”