In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Gil Pender ponders the advice he gets from his literary heroes from the 1920’s.
King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN and many modern artists, poets, and philosophers have agreed. In the 1920’s T.S.Eliot and his house guest Bertrand Russell were two of them. Russell remained a pessimistic atheist the rest of his life but T.S. Eliot found a solution to his pessimism and put his faith in Christ. Later Kerry Livgren of the rock group KANSAS wrote the hit song DUST IN THE WIND in 1978 and like T.S.Eliot Livgren put his faith in Christ.
(Kerry Livgren)
In 2006 in the publication CROSSWALK Livgren noted:
Dust In the Wind” was certainly the most well-known song, and the message was out of Ecclesiastes. I never ceased to be amazed at how the message resonates with people, from the time it came out through now. The message is true and we have to deal with it, plus the melody is memorable and very powerful. It disturbs me that there’s only part of the [Christian] story told in that song. It’s about someone yearning for some solution, but if you look at the entire body of my work, there’s a solution to the dilemma.
From the book ART AND THE BIBLE by Francis Schaeffer:
In our own day, men like Picasso and T. S. Eliot developed new styles in order to speak a new message…. Think, for example, of T. S. Eliot’s form of poetry in The Waste Land. The fragmented form matches the vision of fragmented man. But it is intriguing that after T. S. Eliot became a Christian — for example, in The Journey of the Magi — he did not use quite this same form. Rather, he adapted it for the message he was now giving — a message with a Christian character. But he didn’t entirely give up the form; he didn’t go back to Tennyson. Rather, he adapted the form that he used in The Waste Land, changing it to fit the message that he was now giving. In other words, T. S. Eliot the Christian wrote somewhat differently than T. S. Eliot the “modern man.” Therefore, while we must use twentieth-century styles, we must not use them in such a way as to be dominated by the world-views out of which they have arisen.
What Became of T.S. Eliot? [The Common Room]
Torrey Common Room discussion with Joe Henderson, Matt Jenson, and Melissa Schubert
Actor David Lowe and poet T.S. Eliot.
In the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS the main character has this short encounter with T.S. Eliot and he tells Eliot of his admiration for the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
GIL PENDER WHILE GETTING INTO CAR: Gil Pender.-
T.S.EILIOT: Tom Eliot.
GIL PENDER: Tom Eliot? Tom Stearns Eliot? T.S Eliot? T.S. Eliot?
T.S.EILIOT: – Pender.-
GIL PENDER: PRUFROCK’S like my mantra! OK. Sorry. Sorry. Listen. Where I come from,people measure out their lives with coke spoons.-
July 27, 2011
The Most Influential Poem of the 20th Century
![Young, Glynn - 090925-107 [nym]](https://haltingarkansasliberalswithtruth.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/34a1e-6a00e3981f261e8833014e8a200c66970d-pi.jpg "Young, Glynn - 090925-107 [nym]")
In Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris,” writer Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson) desperately wants to live in Paris of the 1920s, the city and time of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Cole Porter and Josephine Baker. And he gets his wish, if only for a few hours each night at midnight. In one scene, he climbs into a taxi and finds T.S. Eliot, and he says that “Prufrock” is like his mantra, but where he comes from in Hollywood, people measure out their lives in coke spoons, not coffee spoons.
If you don’t know the poem, you miss the reference. In the poem, Eliot wrote, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in Poetry Magazine in 1915, when Eliot was all of 27, and it is still considered by many critics and scholars to be the most influential poem of the 20th century. It’s difficult to imagine any poem today having the kind of impact that “Prufrock” did. Published by Poetry with the urging of Ezra Pound, the poem played a major role in shaping and defining Modernism in poetry and literature generally.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table…
The poem is longish, unfolding a series of scenes that seem unrelated. Scholars still argue about the subject and meaning of the poem, but it is clearly a poem about the disconnectedness of modern society and man’s disconnected place within that society. In that sense, it is as contemporary today as it was in 1915.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains…
Eliot uses a combination of rhyme, free verse and repetition. The reader happens upon the rhyme but is soon swept away from it, only to return suddenly to it. There’s nothing predictable here, no planet in its orbit or star in its galaxy. But there are delightful lines, including some of the most famous in 20th century poetry:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
When I was in high school, Eliot’s poetry always posed a problem – should it be taught in American literature (junior year) or English literature (senior year)? My school solved the problem by teaching Eliot in both years. In American literature, we learned “The Hollow Men” – This is the way the world ends, / Not with a bang but a whimper. In senior year, it was “Prufrock” and the poems published as Four Quartets. (I still have the paperback edition of Four Quartets published for 95 cents in 1968; underlined in many places with margin notes in my own handwriting.)
“Prufrock” was written more than two decades before Eliot embraced the Christian faith. And yet the sense of a broken world and broken people permeate it. In an odd way, to read it now is to see the poem anticipating the intellectual and spiritual frame of mind of the poet that would eventually lead the poet to faith.
Eliot might smile at that. Despite all of the scholarly hubbub about the themes and meanings of his poems, all he himself said was that he simply wanted people to read his poetry.
I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each…
There are various recordings of Eliot reading the poem, and you can find these at YouTube, but one of the best I’ve come across is the reading by Spoken Verse, which allows you to follow the words as they are read.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot (read by Tom O’Bedlam)
Francis Schaeffer noted that Solomon took a look at the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death “under the sun.” This phrase UNDER THE SUN appears over and over in Ecclesiastes. The Christian Scholar Ravi Zacharias noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term UNDER THE SUN — What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system and you are left with only this world of Time plus Chance plus matter.”
Francis Schaeffer noted that Solomon came to these three conclusions when he looked at life “under the sun.”
- Death is the great equalizer (Eccl 3:20, “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”)
- Chance and time have determined the past, and they will determine the future. (Ecclesiastes 9:11-13 “I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so people are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.”)
- There is no ultimate lasting meaning in life. (1:2)
By the way, the final chapter of Ecclesiastes finishes with Solomon emphasizing that serving God is the only proper response of man. Solomon looks above the sun and brings God back into the picture in the final chapter of the book in Ecclesiastes 12:13-14, “ Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.”
The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.
In 1978 I heard the song “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas when it rose to #6 on the charts. That song told me that Kerry Livgren the writer of that song and a member of Kansas had come to the same conclusion that Solomon had and that “all was meaningless.” I remember mentioning to my friends at church that we may soon see some members of Kansas become Christians because their search for the meaning of life had obviously come up empty even though they had risen from being an unknown band to the top of the music business and had all the wealth and fame that came with that.
Livgren wrote, “All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the Wind, All we are is dust in the wind, Don’t hang on, Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky, It slips away, And all your money won’t another minute buy.”
Both Kerry Livgren and Dave Hope of Kansas became Christians eventually. Kerry Livgren first tried Eastern Religions and Dave Hope had to come out of a heavy drug addiction. I was shocked and elated to see their personal testimony on The 700 Club in 1981 and that same interview can be seen on youtube today. Livgren lives in Topeka, Kansas today where he teaches “Diggers,” a Sunday school class at Topeka Bible Church. Hope is the head of Worship, Evangelism and Outreach at Immanuel Anglican Church in Destin, Florida.
You can hear DAVE HOPE and Kerry Livgren’s stories from this youtube link:
(part 1 ten minutes)
(part 2 ten minutes)
Kansas – Dust In The Wind
John Piippo makes the case that Bertrand Russell would have loved Woody Allen because they both were atheists and believers in Evolution who don’t deny the ramifications of atheism!!!
Monday, August 06, 2012
(More On) Woody Allen’s Atheism
As I wrote in a previous post, I like Woody Allen. I have long admired his films. I’m an Ingmar Bergmann fan, too, and Allen is indebted to Bergmann. (See “Ingmar Bergman Slips Into the Darkness…”)
Allen is (as Bergmann was) an atheist. He brings (as did Bergmann) his atheism into his films, overtly and covertly. Allen is not hiding the fact that: God does not exist (for Allen, not for me); therefore life is absurd, pointless. But of course. Any atheist who thinks otherwise is just another village atheist in denial. I find Allen’s atheism honest and lived-out.
The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Woody (“Older, Mellower, but Still Woody”).
Allen is asked:
Some say your view is that life is pointless, and others say you’re a romantic realist who believes in being true to yourself. Which is it?
Allen: “I think that’s the best you can do, but the true situation is a hopeless one because nothing does last. If we reduce it absurdly for a moment, you know the sun will burn out. You know the universe is falling apart at a fantastically accelerating rate and that at some point there won’t be anything at all. So whether you are Shakespeare or Beethoven or Michelangelo, your stuff’s not going to last. So, given that, even if you were immortal, that time is going to come. Of course, you have to deal with a much more critical problem, which is that you’re not going to last microscopically close to that. So, nothing does last. You do your things. One day some guy wakes up and gets the Times and says, “Hey, Woody Allen died. He keeled over in the shower singing. So, where do you want to have lunch today?””
Allen is correct on the following points:
- With no God, our true situation is hopeless. Why? Because “nothing does last.” “The sun will burn out.” “The universe is falling apart.” “At some point there won’t be anything at all.”
- Your stuff, your little creations, are not going to last.
- When you die, not only will there be no “you,” but no one or nothing is going to care (relatively speaking, in a massive sense).
Philosopher-atheist Bertrand Russell, in his famous “A Free Man’s Worship,” concluded the same things. (See “Bertrand Russell – A Free Man’s Worship & the Logic of Atheism”)
Russell wrote:
“Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
In 1926 he converted to Christianity. BETWEEN THE LINES AUTHOR José de Segovia TRANSLATOR Esther Barrett 28 APRIL 2015 11:33 h
Eliot might seem to be quintessentially British, were it not for the fact that he was born in Saint Louis, the home of blues.
A century after his first book and half a century after his death, T.S. Eliot has come to be known as one of the major poets of the twentieth century.
He wrote: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.” This begins his poem “The Waste Land” (1922). This fragmented poem reflects the emptiness felt by this Nobel Literature Prize laureate, just before his conversion to Christianity.
The name of Thomas Stearns has gone down in history in those initials, T.S., always accompanying his surname. Eliot might seem to be quintessentially British, were it not for the fact that he was born in Saint Louis, the home of Blues, under the Missouri skies. He was the youngest of seven children of a Boston family established by a Calvinist who had emigrated to New England. His father ran a brick production business, and his grandfather had been a Unitarian preacher. He had been sent as a missionary to catholic St. Louis, but he became rector at Harvard and the founder of the University of Washington.
Eliot found the wonder of forgiveness and trusted that, through the blood of Christ, he was free of all sin and guilt.
Eliot’s poetic inspiration seems to have come from his mother, who also wrote poetry. Eliot published one of her books dedicated to Savonarola. She was a religious woman, who applied a strict discipline based on self-denial to her children. As a result of this, Eliot always felt guilty for any pleasure, however harmless it might be. Suffering from a congenital hernia, the young Eliot discovered that, debarred from social activities, sports and games, the only pleasure he could find was in books. They did not make him feel any better about himself though. On the contrary, he was always keenly conscious of his sinful state and of his guilt. This made him prone to deep anxiety, dominated by scepticisms and disillusionment, and bereft of any peace.
TIME FOR INDECISION
Eliot lived through the beginning of a century which full of conflicts and changes, breading great uncertainty.
There will be time to murder and create
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions;
And time for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
(The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1917).
He studied at Harvard, where he obtained a degree in English literature in 1910. He then travelled to Europe, where he wrote “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady”. At the Sorbonne, in Paris, he attended Bergson’s classes, together with a Spanish poet, Antonio Machado. He then returned to Harvard to do a doctorate in philosophy, taking an interest in Sanskrit and oriental religions. He was particularly attracted to Buddhism, but it brought him no peace. Neither could he find any criteria in his own thinking which could give him the objectivity needed to discover the Absolute that he sought in philosophy. He was at the German university of Marburg at the outbreak of the First World War and was obliged to leave the country, travelling to England where he continued his academic career in Oxford. To the war he lost his best friend, Jean Verdenal, as he watched European culture sink into the mire and blood of a long drawn-out trench war, which left a whole generation broken.
Unreal City, Under the Brown fog of a Winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had not thought death had undone so many.(…)
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse that you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
(The Waste Land)
Although his doctoral thesis was accepted in Harvard, Eliot decided not to present it in, having had to cancel his travel plans at the last minute owing to the danger of crossing a sea full of German submarines. He saw this as some kind of sign, missing out on the title that he had worked towards, even though he was subsequently awarded many academic honours.
____
Bertrand Russell in 1907
A DIFFICULT MARRIAGE
In 1915, shortly after they met, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Their marriage was particularly difficult. The story was taken to the cinema in the 1994 film, Tom and Viv, by the British director Brian Gilbert and starring Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson. Willem Dafoe plays Eliot in the film about his difficult marriage.
FOR A TIME, THEY SHARED THEIR HOME WITH THE PHILOSOPHER Bertrand Russell, who began a relationship with Viv. She was always nervous and suffered from bad health. Her emotional instability often made her hysterical. Russell described her as “a person who lives on a knife-edge”, which made him think that she would “end as a criminal or saint”. At that time, Eliot made his living out of teaching but was in serious financial difficulties. The situation became so serious in 1917 that he began to work in a bank in London, as well as teaching and editing a periodical entitled “The Egoist”. He was faithful to his wife, even though he often felt desperate…
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
(The Waste Land)
Virginia Woolf and her husband became friends with the Eliots and published his first book of poems in 1919. Eliot had tried to enlist in the American army, but he was rejected because of his hernia. His father, who had never approved of his literary career, died that year. He had never understood why his son chose to stay in England and he could not accept his choice of wife. He had as good as disinherited him.
(Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot)
WASTE LAND
At the end of the War, Eliot published two other poetry books and began working on “The Waste Land”, while collaborating with another literary journal. He continued to work at the bank, but Vivienne condition got increasingly worse, bringing her to the brink of crisis.
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock (…)
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
But who is that on the other side of you?
(The Waste Land)
The doctors ordered Eliot to spend some time resting by the sea, in Margate. Although he should have gone alone, he did not want to leave Vivienne. In the end, he had to take her to a sanatorium in Paris, before going to Lausanne, where with the help of the poet Ezra Pound, he managed to finish “The Waste Land”. This poem, published in 1922, became the voice of a whole generation, which felt “lost”.
On Margate Sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken finger-nails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect Nothing
la la
To Carthage then I came Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest burning”
THE COST OF FAITH
In 1925, Eliot started working as an editor at the publishing house, Faber, which published “The Hollow Men”, a book of verses inspired by Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. The novel is a staggering sketch of the human depravation which has inspired many authors, and the cinema director Francis Ford Coppola, who sets the story in Vietnam in Apocalypse Now (1979). Through this, Eliot showed that despite his keen awareness of sin, he had not yet made the step of faith, which would cost him “no less than everything”.
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
After searching and struggling throughout his life, Eliot finally surrendered to the “peace that surpasses all understanding”. In 1926 he converted to Christianity and was baptised in a small church near Oxford. Vivienne was not with him. She, along with many of their friends, were against it. Ezra Pound blamed the chaplain of Worcester College, William Stead, for having “corrupted” him.
His conversion did not give him an unwavering faith that filled him with joy; he continued to be introverted, sickly, doubtful and depressive.
Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister saying: “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality. And goes to church”. From this point, Eliot’s faith is essential in order to understand poems like the “The Journey of the Magi”
This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death?
There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this
Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
____________
TS Eliot with Virginia Woolf (middle) and his wife Vivienne
WONDER AT FORGIVENESS
Ash Wednesday is probably the best know public declaration of his faith. Edited in 1930, it precedes his first volume of essays, which he wrote before returning to the United States, where he continued teaching. At that point he took the difficult decision of leaving Vivienne, to whom he dedicated this book. She died at a sanatorium for the mentally infirm in 1947. Ten years later he married Valerie, his secretary.
(T.S. Eliot and second wife Valerie were married in 1957.)
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us (…)
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death (…)
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will(…)
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
His conversion did not give him an unwavering faith that filled him with joy; rather he continued to be somewhat introverted, sickly, doubtful and depressive. However, Eliot found the wonder of forgiveness. He trusted that through the blood of Christ he was free from sin and guilt. After a life dedicated to poetry, literary criticism and theatre, he finished off his career with his “Notes towards a definition of culture”, which show the Christian perspective through which he viewed the world.
Virginia Woolf considered him dead to her, following his conversion to Christianity.
He died in 1965 and was buried in the famous Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. He left these wastelands, having found the life-giving water springing from the Rock and amazed by the miracle of forgiveness.
We thank Thee who has moved us to building, to finding,
to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.
And when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light, we
may set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision
is made. And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.
O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great glory!
(The Rock)
_________
Related posts:
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The Daily Hatch 