"Burnt Norton"

Because I couldn't really make heads or tails of "The Waste Land," I decided to take a stab at "Burnt Norton." What I gathered from this poem is that it's about the presence of time, specifically about it's ever-present capacity. Eliot's speaker seems to be saying that the past, present, and future coexist simultaneously, not one after the other.

I find this interesting because I recently saw an episode of "Through the Wormhole" on The Science Channel that centered around the possibility of time not existing. Many scientists suggest that time is merely a human construction of ordering events sequentially. It is innately built in our minds to order events this way, so without that connection, time itself is nonexistent.

T.S. Eliot must have thought the same, but probably not with as much scientific influence. He expresses these feelings in the following lines:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable."

Eliot also touches on events, as hinted in that last line of the stanza. He considers that if time is "unredeemable," then what could have happened only has value in a "world of speculation." Eventually, it all comes back to the present. But I like how Eliot constructs those "what-if" scenarios almost as other worlds -- like the paths we did not take are actually taking place in some other reality somewhere.

But if we were down that imaginary road, we'd still be questioning the other road not taken, in which case this means that no matter what events happen, there will always be an alternate present that may or may not exist adjacent to our reality.

Follow-up to Friday's Discussion

I thoroughly enjoyed last Friday's discussion over Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." I was especially enlightened when Scott posed the possibility of Nick Adams being gay. I thought that this could definitely be the case.

I originally read the line about Hopkins giving his gun away and thought it said that Nick gave Hopkins his gun and then never heard from him again, so I thought this meant Hopkins had committed suicide. I didn't think much else about the matter. After being corrected, I see the multitude of possibilities for this character and his relationship to Nick, and he obviously played an important role in his life if he was one of the only people Nick reminisced about during his trek into nature.

One scene in particular is when he's talking about their argument over how to make coffee the right way. Hemingway says Nick laughs at it, but he makes the coffee Hopkins' way, rather than his own. Why would he do that? I think it was a sentimental action, one that brought him closer to this person he obviously cared so much about.