serenity now

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.”
– T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]

effort

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

― T.S. Eliot

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

- T.S. Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Eliot

lamenting the loss of a shared culture

Regarded as the most important poem of the 20th Century, the full text of former investment banker T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land here.

Shame

Manic-depressive individuals experience acute shame and humiliation for many reasons: because of psychosis [particularly manic] and shame for bizarre and inappropriate behavior, violence, financial irregularities, and sexual indiscretions, to name a few of the common problems. One patient stated, "No one who has not had the experience can realize the mortification of having been insane" [Reiss, 1910]. Robert Lowell, in "Home," describes the indignities of psychiatric hospitalization: "we might envy museum pieces/that can be pasted together or disfigured/and feel no indignity" [1977]. And Graves [1942] wrote:

While the intoxication of mania lasts, I for one have no disposition to embrace death. After the intoxication is over, my chief emotional reaction is shame and disgust with myself, and a wonder that my fear of death could be so wonderfully and idiotically twisted. That the facing humiliation, of despair, or deprivation should produce a desire for death is quite natural.

Joshua Logan, in turn, described his chagrin in the wake of a manic episode:

How can I go back to the theatre after all I've put my friends through, after all the galloping whispers and all the people who've seen me in this strange state. How will anybody, as long as I live, believe that I'm well again? [Logan, 1976, p. 180] 

In portions of two letters to T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell wrote of his embarrassment following two different manic episodes:

[June 1961] The whole business has been very bruising, and it is fierce facing the pain I have caused, and humiliating [to] think that it has all happened before and that control and self-knowledge come so slowly, if at all.

[March 1964] I want to apologize for plaguing you with so many telephone calls last November and December. When the "enthusiasm" is coming on me it is accompanied by a feverish reaching to my friends. After it's over I wince and whither. [Robert Lowell, cited in I. Hamilton, 1982, pp. 286, 307]

* Manic-Depressive Illness, F.K. Goodwin & K.R. Jamison, Oxford University Press, 1990, p.19

pervasiveness of denial

"Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

- T.S. Eliot

professionals

Nathaniel Hawthorne[1804-1864]

"In fact, the more you look, the more reasons writers give for being writers. Many writers say that they become writers because they simply could not do anything else. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: 'I don't want to be a doctor, and live by men's diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don't see there's anything left for me but to be an author.' T.S. Eliot, who had been a boxer in college, noted: 'I was too slow a mover. It was much easier to be a poet.' And George Bernard Shaw pointed out a practical advantage of the writing life that still holds true: 'My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.'"

- Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease, pg. 214

Make perfect your will

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The lot of man is ceaseless labor,

Or ceaseless idleness,which is still harder,

Or irregular labour,which is not pleasant.

- T. S. Eliot [1888-1965], excerpts from Choruses from the Rock, 1934

An earlier reference to T.S. Eliot here.

life

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T. S. Eliot [1888-1965], excerpt from Little Gidding, No. 4 of 'Four Quartets'

An earlier reference to T.S. Eliot here.

Thomas Stearns

In his study, 1951

In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
- Nobel Laureate T.S. Eliot [1888-1965], East Coker, No. 2 of 'Four Quartets'

An earlier reference to T.S. Eliot here.

Spanish Steps

John Keats died in 1821 in the house in the right foreground.

'Beauty is truth; truth, beauty'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
- John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn [1819]

-- surely the most famous equation in English literature. The exact meaning of those lines is disputed; no less a critic than T.S. Eliot considered them a blight upon an otherwise beautiful poem.