![]() ![]() Nothingness, Eliot points out, cannot inform human reality because it never forms part of the present. ![]() The poet engages Parmenides’ argument that only being exists. Human reality is often stringent, more hit-or-miss than postmodernists care to realize. Eliot’s contention serves thoughtful people as a forewarning of the nihilistic demons to be unleashed by postmodernity in the coming decades. Instead, we only know what has actually come to pass, not what could or might have been. Lived time, as this is embodied by individual human beings, is Eliot’s main focus in Four Quartets.Įliot informs us that “what might have been” is an abstract notion that can only be entertained as speculation. Because time-past and present are enveloped by time-future, Eliot suggests that “all time is unredeemable.” This means that time cannot be treated in abstraction but as the vital ground of human reality. Eliot begins Burnt Norton with a reflection of time as cyclical. ![]() … to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. ![]()
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