We know that Hemingway read Ecclesiastes and his title THE SUN ALSO RISES is taken from it.

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose… The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to its circuits… All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come thither they return again.
– Ecclesiastes

I think he also took note of Ecclesiastes 2;18: “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” No wonder he later said, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know…” This seems to be the same conclusion that Jeffrey Fisher comes up with in his article, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” I will take a look at that later in this post.

Ernest Hemingway was arguably the greatest American writer of all time although some would say William Faulkner or  Mark Twain.  He was very brilliant. Notice in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS the awe Gil Pender has for Hemingway.

Hemingway & Fitzgerald Clip – Midnight in Paris

HEMINGWAY:Hemingway.

GIL PENDER:Hemingway?

HEMINGWAY:You liked my book?

GIL PENDER:Liked? I loved! All your work.

HEMINGWAY:Yes, it was a good book,because it was an honest book,and that’s what war does to men.And there’s nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud,unless you die gracefully,and then it’s not only noble, but brave.

ZELDA FITZGERALD:Did you read my story? What’d you think?

HEMINGWAY:There was some fine writing in it, but it was unfulfilled.-

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Later in the film Gil Pender asked Hemingway to read and criticize his own manuscript and give him some pointers:

GIL PENDER:I’m not gonna be competitive with you.

HEMINGWAY:You’re too self-effacing.It’s not manly.If you’re a writer, declare yourself the best writer!But you’re not, as long as I’m around. Unless you want to put the gloves on and settle it?

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The next morning he tells his girlfriend of his night before with Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

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INEZ: Good thing you didn’t go last night. You would’ve hated the music, and the crowd,but I had fun.What’re you thinking about?You seem like you’re in a daze.

GIL PENDER: If I was to tell you that I spent last night with Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald,- what would you say?-

INEZ: Is that what you were dreaming about?Your literary idols?

GIL PENDER:  Yeah, but if I wasn’t dreaming…What does that mean?If I was with Hemingway, and Fitzgerald,and Cole Porter.

INEZ:I’d be thinking brain tumor.

GIL PENDER: And when I tell you,Zelda Fitzgerald is exactlyas we’ve come to know her througheverything we’ve read in books and articles.You know, charming,but all over the map.You know, she does notlike Hemingway one bit.and Scott knows Hemingway is right about her, butyou can see how conflicted he is because he loves her!

INEZ: Come on! Get up! We should quit the idle chatter,because we’re gonna be late.

GIL PENDER: You know, I’m not gonna…I think I’m gonna stay here and do some work on my novel,’cause there’s a little polishing I wanna do.

INEZ: No. You can do that later. Mom said we can use her decorator’s discount. Get up!

Midnight in Paris OST – 03 – Recado

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– See more at: http://biologos.org/blogs/archive/ecclesiastes-education-and-the-pursuit-of-meaning#sthash.LW9MN2ea.dpuf

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Midnight in Paris OST – 02 – Je Suis Seul Ce Soir

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When I think about Gil Pender, Woody Allen’s lead character in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, it reminds me of all the atheists that try their best to come to grips with the fact that without God in the picture more knowledge does bring more worries. Jeffrey Fisher’s article below is a perfect example. Here is a portion of his article below:

3. According to Romans 1 there is no such thing as an atheist but all people know in their hearts that God exists.

4. The song DUST IN THE WIND released by KANSAS in 1978 correctly notes humanist man’s nihilistic outlook on life and 3 years later Kerry Livgren and Dave Hope from KANSAS admitted the message of the song was from ECCLESIASTES and they both put their faith in Christ.

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.”

5. There is evidence that indicates the Bible is accurate and can be trusted. Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. 3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism), 4. Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. 5. The Discovery of the Hittites, 6.Shishak Smiting His Captives, 7. Moabite Stone, 8. Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, 9A Verification of places in Gospel of John and Book of Acts., 9B Discovery of Ebla Tablets. 10. Cyrus Cylinder, 11. Puru “The lot of Yahali” 9th Century B.C.E., 12. The Uzziah Tablet Inscription, 13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology., 

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Midnight in Paris OST – 16 – Le Parc De Plaisir

Ernest Hemingway Quotes: On His Birthday, 14 Memorable Sayings, Photos To Remember Author Born In 1898

BY TIM MARCIN @TIMMARCIN ON 07/20/15 AT 9:35 PM

Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway was born exactly 116 years ago on Tuesday. The author known for his terse, matter-of-fact prose was born July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois.

Hemingway — who served as a volunteer ambulance driver for Italy on the front lines of World War I — began his career as a journalist and eventually ventured into fiction, often addressing war in his writing. Hemingway also often wrote detailed descriptions of hunting, bull-fighting, fishing and eating/drinking.

He wrote the classic novels “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and later wrote the popular short story, “The Old Man and the Sea.” Along with his successful novels, Hemingway also wrote a number of short stories that were well-received, such as “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” and a series about a character named Nick Adams.

Hemingway, also known for his hard-drinking and bullish nature, was an adventurer who traveled about the world. He suffered in his later years from a number of injuries and mental health struggles. Hemingway took his own life in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961.

His writing has remained popular, punctuated by simple sentences and a direct style often referenced and imitated. His story structure, in which he often added to the story through the omission of key details, has been praised, as well. Below are pictures of the writer and quotes from Hemingway on the anniversary of his birthday. The quotes, which were either spoken or written, were compiled from Brainy Quote and Goodreads.

Ernest Hemingway posed with fish that he caught in Wallon Lake in Michigan, 1916.PHOTO: REUTERS

1. “Courage is grace under pressure.”

2. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

3. “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

4. “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

5. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

6. “Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”

7. “Courage is grace under pressure.”

8. “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

9. “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.”

10. “Never confuse movement with action.”

11. “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

12. “There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.”

13. “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

14. “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

Related posts:

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Woody Allen’s liberal political views come out in man of his films and his solution for peace is not realistic since he doesn’t recognize the Bible’s view of mankind’s fallen nature. With a correct view of man’s condition then subjects like war and abortion can be confronted and not ignored as many liberals. Appeasement is their rally cry when evil men seek to expand their kingdoms and “abortion rights of women” are advanced at the expense of the right to life rights of unborn female babies. All of this stems from an insufficient view of the sinfulness of man and where it originated from which was Adam’s rebellion against God in the Garden of Eden many years ago.

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In the movie BANANAS Woody Allen befriends a liberal student who gets him involved in liberal war protests. Later he goes to a Central America country and gets mixed up in what later becomes a coup by military group that says they want to return the rights to the people but they really are just the same as the previous regime.

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In the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS we also see these same liberal views come out of the mouth of GIL PENDER.

INEZ: We should get back to town. We’re meeting Mom and Dad for dinner.

GIL PENDER: Let’s meet ’em.

HELEN (INEZ’ MOM): There are our sightseers.

INEZ:If I never see another charming boulevard or bistro again, I…-

GIL PENDER: What a town!- Yes. To visit.I could see myself living here!I feel like the Parisians kind of “get me.”I can see myself just strolling along the Left Bank with a,you know, baguette under my arm,headed to Café de Floreto scribble away on my book.What did Hemingway say? He called it a “moveable feast.”

HELEN:In this traffic, nothing moves.Well, a toast to John’s new business venture here!- Cheers!- Cheers!-

GIL PENDER: Congratulations.-

JOHN (INEZ’ DAD) : Thank you.Well, I’ll be perfectly frank.I’m excited about this corporate merger between our folks and the French company, but otherwise,I’m not a big Francophile.-

HELEN: John hates their politics.-

JOHN: Certainly been no friend to the United States.

GIL PENDER: Well, I mean, you can’t exactly blame them for not following us down that rabbit’s hole in Iraq.- The whole Bush, you know,…-

INEZ: Oh, please. Let’s not get into this- bad discussion again and again. –

GIL PENDER: Honey,honey. We’re not getting into– By the way, it’s fine for your father and I to disagree.That’s what a democracy is.Your father defends the right-wing of the Republican party,and I happen to think you almost got to be- like, a demented lunatic, but it’s like…- Okay. Okay!But it doesn’t mean we don’t respect each other’s views, am I right?-

(Bill Wellons pictured above)

Bill Wellons (teaching pastor at FELLOWSHIP BIBLE CHURCH in Little Rock from 1977 to 2009) in his sermon on Ecclesiastes MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR TIME (04-28-96) made these comments:

Ecclesiastes 3:7 says, “There is a time to be silent and a time to speak.” I wish I had learned this a long time ago.

James 1:19   ^“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger…”

Proverbs 10:19 “When words are many, transgression is not lacking,  but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.” 

My interpretation of this verse is “a closed mouth gathers no feet.” THERE IS A TIME TO SPEAK TOO. Those in attendance at the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast held in conjunction with the National Religious Broadcasters witnessed a time for speaking. Mother Teresa took the podium and pleaded for the lives of unborn children. This tiny nun  began her address by reading a portion of scripture. Then she stunned the assembled dignitaries which included President Clinton and the first lady and the Vice President and his wife by saying “The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion.” Then she asked a great question. “For if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child how can we tell people they can’t kill each other?”

Chuck Colson wrote that Mother Teresa was polite and respectful yet she did not flinch in speaking the truth. She demonstrated civility wedded to bold conviction confronting world leaders with the message of biblical righteousness. Clearly she viewed the breakfast as a time to speak.

She continued, “Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child.” After her speech she approached President Bill Clinton and pointed her finger at him and said, “Stop killing babies.”

Bl. Mother Teresa: “every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus”

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Former US President Bill Clinton talks to a nun from Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata on Saturday.
— Reuters photo

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Woody Allen’s liberal political views come out in his films and his solution for peace is not realistic since he doesn’t recognize the Bible’s view of mankind’s fallen nature.

Mother Teresa said, “For if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child how can we tell people they can’t kill each other?” This demonstrated Mother Teresa’s understanding of what the Bible has to say about our sin nature since the fall in Genesis Chapter 3. Francis Schaeffer in his fine book about modern man ESCAPE FROM REASON  states,

“the True Christian position is that, in space and time and history, there was an unprogrammed man who made a choice, and actually rebelled against God…without Christianity’s answer that God made a significant man in a significant history with evil being the result of Satan’s and then man’s historic space-time revolt, there is no answer but to accept Baudelaire’s answer [‘If there is a God, He is the devil’] with tears. Once the historic Christian answer is put away, all we can do is to leap upstairs and say that against all reason God is good.”(pg. 81)

(Francis Schaeffer pictured below)

Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has 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.”

Woody Allen as an atheist could not hope to find a lasting meaning to his life in a closed system without bringing God back into the picture. This is the same exact case with Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Three thousand years ago, Solomon took a look at life “under the sun” in his book of Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes 4:1 English Standard Version (ESV)

Evil Under the Sun

4 Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them.

Let me make three points concerning the problem of evil and suffering. First, the problem of evil and suffering hit this world in a big way because of Adam and what happened in Genesis Chapter 3. Second, if there is no God then there is no way to distinguish good from evil and there will be no ultimate punishment for Hitler and Josef Mengele. (By the way Mengele never faced punishment and lived his long life out in peace.) Third. Christ came and suffered and will destroy all evil from this world eventually forever.

Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8 English Standard Version (ESV)

A Time for Everything

3 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

(The Byrds rock band below)

This series deals with the Book of Ecclesiastes and Woody Allen films.  The first post  dealt with MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT and it dealt with the fact that in the Book of Ecclesiastes Solomon does contend like Hobbes  and Stanley that life is “nasty, brutish and short” and as a result has no meaning UNDER THE SUN.

The movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS offers many of the same themes we see in Ecclesiastes. The second post looked at the question: WAS THERE EVER A GOLDEN AGE AND DID THE MOST TALENTED UNIVERSAL MEN OF THAT TIME FIND TRUE SATISFACTION DURING IT?

In the third post in this series we discover in Ecclesiastes that man UNDER THE SUN finds himself caught in the never ending cycle of birth and death. The SURREALISTS make a leap into the area of nonreason in order to get out of this cycle and that is why the scene in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and Luis Bunuel works so well!!!! These surrealists look to the area of their dreams to find a meaning for their lives and their break with reality is  only because they know that they can’t find a rational meaning in life without God in the picture.

The fourth post looks at the solution of WINE, WOMEN AND SONG and the fifth and sixth posts look at the solution T.S.Eliot found in the Christian Faith and how he left his fragmented message of pessimism behind. In the seventh post the SURREALISTS say that time and chance is all we have but how can that explain love or art and the hunger for God? The eighth  post looks at the subject of DEATH both in Ecclesiastes and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. In the ninth post we look at the nihilistic worldview of Woody Allen and why he keeps putting suicides into his films.

In the tenth post I show how Woody Allen pokes fun at the brilliant thinkers of this world and how King Solomon did the same thing 3000 years ago. In the eleventh post I point out how many of Woody Allen’s liberal political views come a lack of understanding of the sinful nature of man and where it originated.

Related posts:

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A suicide attempt appears in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS when Zelda Fitzgerald goes to the Seine River with the intention of jumping and Gil Pender stops her. It seems the nihilist worldview of Woody Allen keeps him putting suicides into his films.

Remember Professor Levy from the movie CRIMES AND MISDEMEANOR? After addressing the question  IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? Levy jumps out a window!!!

After Levy committed suicide, Cliff reviewed a clip from the documentary footage in which Levy states: “But we must always remember that when we are born we need a great deal of love to persuade us to stay in life. Once we get that love, it usually lasts us. But the universe is a pretty cold place. It’s we who invest it with our feelings. And under certain conditions, we feel that the thing isn’t worth it anymore.”

Hearing the news of Levy’s death, Halley says, “No matter how elaborate a philosophical system you work out, in the end it’s got to be incomplete.”

Professor Levy seen below:

Crimes e Pecados

What is Woody Allen’s main outlook on life? Francis Schaeffer described it as existentialism. 

So some humanists act as if they have a great advantage over Christians. They act as if the advance of science and technology and a better understanding of history (through such concepts as the evolutionary theory) have all made the idea of God and Creation quite ridiculous.
This superior attitude, however, is strange because one of the most striking developments in the last half-century is the growth of a profound pessimism among both the well-educated and less-educated people. The thinkers in our society have been admitting for a long time that they have no final answers at all.
Take Woody Allen, for example. Most people know his as a comedian, but he has thought through where mankind stands after the “religious answers” have been abandoned. In an article in Esquire (May 1977), he says that man is left with:
… alienation, loneliness [and] emptiness verging on madness…. The fundamental thing behind all motivation and all activity is the constant struggle against annihilation and against death. It’s absolutely stupefying in its terror, and it renders anyone’s accomplishments meaningless. As Camus wrote, it’s not only that he (the individual) dies, or that man (as a whole) dies, but that you struggle to do a work of art that will last and then you realize that the universe itself is not going to exist after a period of time. Until those issues are resolved within each person – religiously or psychologically or existentially – the social and political issues will never be resolved, except in a slapdash way.
Allen sums up his view in his film Annie Hall with these words: “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.”

However, our intention here is neither to go into the history of irrationalism, nor to examine the proponents of existentialism in our own century, but rather to concentrate on its main thesis. It is this that confronts us on all sides today, and it is impossible to understand modern man without understanding this concept.
Because we shall be using several terms a great deal now, we would ask the reader to attend carefully. When we speak of irrationalism or existentialism or the existential methodology, we are pointing to a quite simple idea. It may have been expressed in a variety of complicated ways by philosophers, but it is not a difficult concept.
Imagine that you are at the movies watching a suspense film. As the story unfolds, the tension increases until finally the hero is trapped in some impossible situation and everyone is groaning inwardly, wondering how he is going to get out of the mess. The suspense is heightened by the knowledge (of the audience, not the hero) that help is on the way in the form of the good guys. The only question is: will the good guys arrive in time?
Now imagine for a moment that the audience is slipped the information that there are no good guys, that the situation of the hero is not just desperate, but completely hopeless. Obviously, the first thing that would happen is that the suspense would be gone. You and the entire audience would simply be waiting for the axe to fall.
If the hero faced the end with courage, this would be morally edifying, but the situation itself would be tragic. If, however, the hero acted as if help were around the corner and kept buoying himself up with this thought (“Someone is on the way!” – “Help is at hand!”), all you could feel for him would be pity. It would be a means to keep hope alive within a hopeless situation. The hero’s hope would change nothing on the outside; it would be unable to manufacture, out of nothing, good guys coming to the rescue. All it would achieve would the hero’s own mental state of hopefulness rather than hopelessness.
The hopefulness itself would rest on a lie or an illusion and thus, viewed objectively, would be finally absurd. And if the hero really knew what the situation was, but consciously used the falsehood to buoy up his feelings and go whistling along, we would either say, “Poor guy!” or “He’s a fool.” It is this kind of conscious deceit that someone like Woody Allen has looked full in the face and will have none of.
Now this is what the existential methodology is about. If the universe we are living in is what the materialistic humanists say it is, then with our reason (when we stop to think about it) we could find absolutely no way to have meaning or morality or hope or beauty. This would plunge us into despair. We would have to take seriously the challenge of Albert Camus (1913-1960) in the first sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”92 Why stay alive in an absurd universe? Ah! But that is not where we stop. We say to ourselves – “There is hope!” (even though there is no help). “We shall overcome!” (even though nothing is more certain than that we shall be destroyed, both individually at death and cosmically with the end of all conscious life). This is what confronts us on all sides today: the modern irrational-ism.

(Scott and Zelda pictured below)

This series deals with the Book of Ecclesiastes and Woody Allen films.  The first post  dealt with MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT and it dealt with the fact that in the Book of Ecclesiastes Solomon does contend like Hobbes  and Stanley that life is “nasty, brutish and short” and as a result has no meaning UNDER THE SUN.

The movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS offers many of the same themes we see in Ecclesiastes. The second post looked at the question: WAS THERE EVER A GOLDEN AGE AND DID THE MOST TALENTED UNIVERSAL MEN OF THAT TIME FIND TRUE SATISFACTION DURING IT?

In the third post in this series we discover in Ecclesiastes that man UNDER THE SUN finds himself caught in the never ending cycle of birth and death. The SURREALISTS make a leap into the area of nonreason in order to get out of this cycle and that is why the scene in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and Luis Bunuel works so well!!!! These surrealists look to the area of their dreams to find a meaning for their lives and their break with reality is  only because they know that they can’t find a rational meaning in life without God in the picture.

(Pictured below Scott, Scottie and Zelda Fitzgerald, 1922.)

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The Fitzgerald’s vacationing on the French Riviera, May 1924. Scott, Zelda

Zelda and Scottie Fitzgerald, 1933

The fourth post looks at the solution of WINE, WOMEN AND SONG and the fifth and sixth posts look at the solution T.S.Eliot found in the Christian Faith and how he left his fragmented message of pessimism behind. In the seventh post the SURREALISTS say that time and chance is all we have but how can that explain love or art and the hunger for God? The eighth  post looks at the subject of DEATH both in Ecclesiastes and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. In the ninth post we look at the nihilistic worldview of Woody Allen and why he keeps putting suicides into his films.

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)

Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)

 

Tuesday, 13 September 2011

Philosophical Atheist, Before you Commit Suicide Read Ecclesiastes

People interested in truth often look to philosophy for answers. However, atheist philosophies offer more questions than answers, and this has serious consequences. Statistics show that atheists end up more prone to suicide than people who have a spiritual foundation.[1] One woman, Sharon Rocha, ended up committing suicide after reading an article at the Raving Atheists blog. In her suicide note, Rocha stated “I have been stripped of my delusions… The universe is a cold, uncaring place in which life is short, meaningless and full of suffering.”[2] If you are an atheist thinking of suicide or just seriously interested in the meaning of life, I recommend reading Solomon’s book Ecclesiastes. The book outlines the deceptions of a false perception of reality and the delight of knowing the God who created the universe for a good purpose.

The name Ecclesiastes is translated from Latin into The Preacher. So what exactly is the connection between philosophy and a preacher preaching the gospel? Well, as I’ve written various articles on Christianity, I’ve found that few atheists are interested in reading them. However, when I’ve pointedly challenged the philosophical roots of atheism, I’ve found some atheists eager to step up and defend their beliefs through dialogue and debate. Philosophical questions and challenges are at the core of the book of Ecclesiastes and there is an undertone of evangelism. There’s a saying “You can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar.” But, as we’ll see in Ecclesiastes, you can attract even more bees by prodding the beehive. But you’d better be prepared for what you’re getting into.

Ecclesiastes 12.11 states: “The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails–given by one Shepherd.” (NIV)

Goads are pointed prods that are used to help direct cattle and sheep. Words of truth prick the conscience and help to guide people towards moral and ethical reason. The firmly embedded nails signify the fixed principles of logic and the reality of absolute truth. Words of logic help to pin down people who have developed a false paradigm and a false view of reality. Logic helps people to see that their beliefs are not in harmony with reality.

Meaninglessness and Materialism

There is a wealth of insight in the book of Ecclesiastes, but you can break down the main philosophical aspects into three main points:

1. The Emptiness of Worldly Pre-occupations – Eccl. 2:1-11

2. The Brevity of Life – Eccl. 12:1-8

3. The Only Logical Purpose in Life – Eccl. 12:13-14[9]

Solomon begins Ecclesiastes 1.2-3 announcing “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’ What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?” How discouraging can you get? The key to understanding the book of Ecclesiastes is to understand that he makes many false statements based upon a materialist perspective, in viewing everything “under the sun” as meaningless. Solomon addresses common materialist idols in society and shows why these are meaningless and empty pursuits. Solomon tries learning, laughter an liquor in an attempt to find satisfaction, but he’s left empty.

Solomon was the perfect candidate to dispel the illusion that wealth and physical pleasure can bring the kind of deep fulfillment we’re searching for in life. As the wealthiest man in history he had everything available at his fingertips. Whatever he desired, he could have. But time after time he was struck by the emptiness of all these material allurements.

Common folks don’t have the money to be able to fulfill whatever whim we may have. In society we are led to believe that if we just had a bigger house, a better job, a more pleasant husband or wife, or whatever it may be, then we would be happy. For us common folks, happiness may seem as though it’s always just around the corner. If only… then I’d be happy. But Solomon became the ultimate object lesson in this regard because he was able to try anything and everything he wanted and he finding out first-hand that materialism represents a sad and vacuous existence compared to theism.

King Solomon of Israel wrote the book of Ecclesiastes after he had backslidden to a certain degree. He had known what was right, but disobeyed God in his life and took on many wives, horse stables and wealth, though these things were forbidden for a king of Israel. Deuteronomy 17:16-17 outlines:

“Only he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he may multiply horses; because Yahweh has said to you, You shall henceforth return no more that way. Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart not turn away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.”

It seems Solomon allowed his great wisdom get to his head, so to speak, and to fill him with pride. His heart gradually became dulled to God’s presence and purpose. But, nevertheless, God disciplined him and allowed him to see his folly. Though he had made mistakes, Solomon offers that truth is still truth and a person should continue to teach the truth as God guides:

“And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs.”[10]

Though he learned lessons the hard way, Solomon gave “good heed” to present the truths that he learned and to help teach people his wisdom. It seems he may have been the first “life coach.” In the United States the “pursuit of happiness” is considered a fundamental right from the Declaration of Independence. But this pursuit, in and of itself, can become destructive when relativism rules. A 2011 study shows the 10 countries with the highest suicide rates tend to be countries where atheism has predominated. Most on the list are countries of the former Soviet Union where atheism was enforced by the state for over 70 years.[11] Other statistics bear out the fact that atheists are more prone to suicide than theists. The American Journal of Psychiatry published an article December 2004, Religious Affiliation and Suicide Attempt, with some basic conclusions:

“CONCLUSIONS: Religious affiliation is associated with less suicidal behavior in depressed inpatients. After other factors were controlled, it was found that greater moral objections to suicide and lower aggression level in religiously affiliated subjects may function as protective factors against suicide attempts. Further study about the influence of religious affiliation on aggressive behavior and how moral objections can reduce the probability of acting on suicidal thoughts may offer new therapeutic strategies in suicide prevention.”[12]

Two key aspects were cited in the AJP article: less aggressive behavior and a moral objection to suicide. The decrease of aggression in spiritual people may have to do with the knowledge that there is in-fact deep meaning in life. Sometimes intellectuals are prone to suicide. Solomon confirmed that materialist knowledge without spiritual truth brings grief: “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”[13]

(Alan Sandage below)

Like Solomon, people who have large IQs can tend to have inflated egos. In 2010, in an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Stephen Hawking declared that heaven is a “fairy tale” for fearful people.[14] He is correct in one sense that Christians are fearful in that we fear God with a sense of awe and wonder at his majestic wisdom and power. In contrast to Hawking, the Jewish physicist Alan Sandage was an atheist most of his life but simply could not dispel all the evidence he had seen in the cosmos pointing to God’s necessary existence. He became a Christian at age 60, explaining, “I could not live a life full of cynicism. I chose to believe, and a peace of mind came over me.”[15] One of the reasons Sandage believed was the complexity of the universe: “The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone.”[16]

(Stephen Hawking below in black and white and then a picture from recent movie about Hawking)

It doesn’t take a great mind to understand what Solomon and Sandage knew, it only takes an open mind. Three decades ago, Stephen Hawking declared humanity was on the verge of discovering the “theory of everything”with a 50 per cent chance of knowing it by 2000. But by 2010 Hawking had given up hope.[17] If only Hawking had read the book of Ecclesiastes, he could have saved a lot of wasted time: “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”[18] Hawking is a good example showing that intelligence and wisdom are two very distinct things.

(King Solomon author of Ecclesiastes below

Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds A Tale of Three Cities Episode:2 Paris 1928 BBC Documentary 2014

Midnight In Paris: A Review

In Film, Reviews on June 16, 2011 at 10:16 am by ERIC PLAAG AND MATT SMITH

Gil, who once lived in Paris briefly, longs for the era of great writing that was the 1920s, when the city was populated by great artists intermingling and collaborating and drinking, like Hemingway, Picasso, Fitzgerald, Dali, and so on. One night after having suffered through another one of Inez’s pseudo-intellectual friend Paul’s (a squirmingly awkward and hilarious turn by Michael Sheen) speeches about art, instead of going dancing with the group, Gil decides to walk back to the hotel and wander the streets at night, gathering some fresh and air and inspiration. He gets lost during this sojourn, and picked up, half drunk, by a couple in an old Peugeot. The people are Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and soon Gil is hobnobbing with everyone from Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso to Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, and having his novel read and critiqued by Gertrude Stein.

__________

The wine, women and song of Paris

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a successful screenwriter who wants more from life. While on holiday in Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her stuffy, conservative parents, Gil’s finds himself at a creative impasse, working on his novel about nostalgia. Goaded by Inez to stick to money-making movies, Gil separates himself from the group one night – lost and drunk – and at the stroke of twelve, finds himself back in 1920′s Paris. There, he runs into all the greats including Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. When he meets Picasso’s girlfriend Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Gil’s got to choose between the past and present.

__________

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.

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

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 20^th 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 20^th 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)

Posted at 03:00 AM in Glynn Young |Permalink

________________

In the article above Glynn Young concluded concerning T.S. Eliot:

“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. 

Solomon unsuccessfully searched for  meaning in this broken world  and he looked in what I call the  6 big L words in the Book of Ecclesiastes. He looked into learning (1:12-18, 2:12-17), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-2, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20).

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.”

1. Death is the great equalizer (Eccl 3:20, “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”)
2. 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.”)
3. 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.”

Posted by John Piippo at 7:21 AM

Bertrand Russell pictured below:

__________

In the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS the main character Gil Pender struggles with despair and Gertrude Stein says to him:

Now, about your book,it’s very unusual, indeed.I mean, in a way, it’s almost like science fiction.We all fear death, and question our place in the universe.The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair,but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.You have a clear and lively voice. Don’t be such a defeatist.

The cruellest month for T.S. Eliot After searching and struggling throughout his life, Eliot finally surrendered to the “peace that surpasses all understanding”.

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:

A list of the most viewed posts on the historical characters mentioned in the movie “Midnight in Paris”

June 4, 2013 – 1:47 am

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Woody Allen | Edit | Comments (0)

Characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 38,Alcoholism and great writers and artists)

July 16, 2011 – 5:47 am

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The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 36, Alice B. Toklas, Woody Allen on the meaning of life)

July 14, 2011 – 5:16 am

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Characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 35, Recap of historical figures, Notre Dame Cathedral and Cult of Reason)

July 13, 2011 – 5:42 am

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The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 34, Simone de Beauvoir)

July 12, 2011 – 6:03 am

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The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 33,Cezanne)

July 11, 2011 – 6:15 am

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 32, Jean-Paul Sartre)

July 10, 2011 – 5:53 am

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The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 31, Jean Cocteau)

July 9, 2011 – 6:15 am

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The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 30, Albert Camus)

July 8, 2011 – 5:48 am

By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)

The Characters referenced in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” (Part 29, Pablo Picasso)

July 7, 2011 – 4:33 am

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The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 28,Van Gogh)

July 6, 2011 – 4:03 am

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The Characters referenced in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” (Part 27, Man Ray)

July 5, 2011 – 4:49 am

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The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 26,James Joyce)

July 4, 2011 – 5:55 am

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The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 25, T.S.Elliot)

July 3, 2011 – 4:46 am

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The characters referenced in Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris” (Part 24, Djuna Barnes)

July 2, 2011 – 7:28 am

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