T. S. Eliot Circa 1930: The Recovery of the Permanent Things

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issue is just judgment under the limits of finitude, the finitude of myself in particular circumstances out of a particular his- tory.4 One must, then, assert at last the ad- equacy or the inadequacy of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to satisfy be- lief or to escape our disbelief. That is what Eliot, in his own retrospective re- flections upon his poems and criticism, his more mature reading of his past work, there is a paradoxical prayer: “Teach US to care and not to care.” We may adapt that prayer in relation to our present point: “Teach us to judge and not to judge,” for there is no escape from an abiding tensional necessity in us to judge. As intellectual creatures, we are required that action, but further required that it be ordinate-that is, action in relation to our finite encounter of the truth of things. It is a necessary impinging from our will upon all aspects of our life, made tenta- tive as judgment bya proper humility. By acknowledging our intellectual insuffi- ciency to absolute judgment, we are not thereby excused the consequent agoniz- ing intellectual action of judging truth perceived. And in judging ordinately we seek a balance in that tensional dyna- mism which characterizes us, intellect bodily alive. That is what Eliot is about when he says in The Use of Poetry, “We must write our poetryas we can.” In turn we must read his poetryas we can, just as we must live as fully as we can within our gifts as intellectual creatures. To insist upon the point: we must act within our recognitions of the finitudes of body, mind, spirit, toward the true, the good, the beautiful. There is an insurmount- able discomfort in us always, consequent upon such recognitions of our limits, which discomfort maytempt to an arrest that is the death of spirit. Yet that discomfort, the uneasiness in our recogni- tion of our finitude, is and must be always with us. Still, given that discomfort and the necessity of an accommodation which requires that we care and not care, we are more Prufrockean than we may ad- mit. Eliot recognizes this common like- ness in us when hesays in concluding his Harvard lectures, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, an evasion of the visible and sensible world.” That is a rather precise characterization of Prufrock, who so conspicuously at- tempts to reject that “visible and sen- Modern Age 223
sible world” which is always screaming to us, “Here! Now!” Eliot will dramatize a Prufrock more deeply seen than in his 1909 poem, putting himself in that role directly but speaking for that which is common to us all. InEastCoker(l940), he says we are always In the middle, not only in the middle of the way But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble, On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, Risking enchantment. These are words most pregnant of the mystery of intellect in its tension be- tween illusion as an ideal projected by desire and a reality feared in its very actualities, an intellect whose surrender to reality costs “no less than everything” in its surrender of autonomy. Long before all our agitations over Descartes’ Cogito, Saint Augustine had made that point about existence. What, he asks himself, if I am deluded about my own existence? Ah, but I must exist, else I cannot be deluded. That is the secret, at first undetected by Eliot, underlying the sardonic desperation in “Preludes,” where the speaker, unable to find any meaning in consciousness itself and so suspicious of consciousness as an illusion, can only conclude: Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots. Long after, the hidden mystery in that point of departure upon both his poetic and spiritual journey brings him to sing with a joy recovered: We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire. Such are the conditions to our finite but free existence as intellectual crea- ture. When one is consumed by the fire of that heaven which holds the earth, as Dante imagines it for us, one must conclude, as Eliot does in the final lines of his final poem, All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. What we learn from Eliot, then, in reading his poetry as a long poem, is that short of a beatific vision, toward which we properly tend, we may be held in the way despite the way’s seeming darkness and our own inclination to waywardness: we are held, insofar as we learn at each present moment and in each particular place of our being, both to care and not to care through intellectual judgment of all manner of things contingent to our present place. 224 Spring 1995
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T. S. Eliot Circa 1930: The Recovery of the Permanent Things

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