What is there to say?  Sleeping till late this morning (9AM) I hope for recovery from Covid.  Some congestion lingers.  Does one know if congestion in the throat is advancing or receding?  There’s only trust in nature, and no knowing.

A return to the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot is gratifying.  I am not the same person who read the four poems when I last removed the book from the shelf.  Inevitably the words are read anew.  Familiar words echo in my mind from the first poem, Burnt Norton, stanza III.

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world…

I think attention is paid at times when our thoughts are disabused from enchantment by the forms and colors of things around us.  In my case, I love the form and the splendid colors of race cars, flowers, females.  On the other hand is to vacate the mind of the sensations that enchant us, a “darkness that purifies the soul” in the poets manner of speaking.  But there’s something else, another frame of mind: a “flicker” that illuminates…

This momentary sense calls to mind the many mornings at the Geneva Starbucks, seated at the table with an acquaintance to my left, also attending to the glowing screen of a laptop.  And on her left is another “regular” with whom I have enjoyed occasional conversation.

The poet describes yours truly, as well as others who often come to Starbucks every morning: strained time-ridden faces…   Moreover are we not all “distracted from distraction by distraction,” struggling in order to overcome a swelling apathy which destroys our concentration?

I have not visited England, so I do not know London or the places which the poet references.  But I think that I could substitute Chicago and a list of surrounding suburbs.

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,

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