The circumstances were all too familiar: I was sitting at a table full of pulled-pork on buns and surrounded by well-wishing friends. Despite my best efforts to avoid the term "open-house" in all of the invitations to this gathering, the afternoon had begun to take on a distinctly post-highschool graduation feel. However, regardless of the red herrings: the beautiful buffet line-up of food, and the hubs of people gathered around picnic tables chatting cheerfully, I had invited no one to the park yesterday to celebrate a recent commencement achievement. Rather, I had asked that they be present so that I could say goodbye. In two days I plan to load my worldly belongings into a truck, peel the suction cup of my heart away from my loving community in West Michigan, and move to our nation's capital where I intend to spend the next half decade or so completing a masters and a doctorate in English Literature.
As I attempted to steer the conversation away from tear-inducing topics with a friend yesterday, she asked me how I planned on keeping everyone up-to-date on my comings and goings, adventures and misadventures, etc. And I said with some embarrassment that I hadn't really come up with a good plan. She advised me to start a blog for that very purpose. So, here I am, making my first post on a blog while morosely contemplating my impending departure, and wishing my spirit of adventure would switch on.
At the advice of another scholarly friend, I've been keeping TS Eliot's Four Quartets near me for the inspiration and cold comfort that they provide. Last night rereading "Little Gidding," the final section came at my mind again in full force, with the profundity of relevance to my current experiences:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
Eliot's concern with the circular connection of beginnings and endings and his insistence of the weightiness of the present moment climax in this final section. I especially appreciate his insistence on the possibilities of purposeful language: "every phrase and every sentence"functions as a microcosm of this world filled with beginnings and endings. Words connect and interweave with actions in his dance of timeless moments. Eliot walks a fine line between potential and reality, a line I will try to respect, but this template for language and the deliberate attitude toward life do fire me in the direction of excitement as I make my acquaintance with beginnings and endings:
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will b to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
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