Looking over the last lines of T.S. Eliot’s fabled Four Quartets, the great masterwork on which his reputation rests, one sees in the final movement of the poem a striking reminder of that which we do well never to forget. It is the knowledge that, in this life certainly, The Waste Land and Oth... Eliot, T. S. Best Price: $9.70 Buy New $8.22 (as of 08:52 UTC - Details)

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

What Eliot is trying to tell us, it seems to me, putting it in a less poetical fashion, is that the end will always be found in the beginning, and that when we finally do come to the end, it will have been granted to us so that once more we may return to the beginning. But not in a way we might have expected. That is because all too often, as Eliot says elsewhere in the poem,

We had the experience, but missed the meaning, 
And approach to the meaning restores the experience 
In a different form, beyond any meaning 
We can assign to happiness. 

And so the only reason for us to set out at all is so that we may go back to where it all began. Only this time, please God, renewed, repristinated. And thus we may truly come to know the place for the first time.

And what is that place but the half-remembered innocence we lost so very long ago, before the serpent insinuated its poison into the fruit, leaving us bereft in a fallen world where circumstance and sin force our minds to recognize that,

The whole earth is our hospital 
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall 
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us but prevents us everywhere.

And who is the “ruined millionaire” but Adam, in whose fall we sinned all. Which is why it is the world before everything fell apart that we most long to return to, the place to which we are most drawn. “Who indeed would think himself unhappy not to be a king,” asks Pascal in the Pensées, “except one who had been dispossessed?” 5-Minute Core Exercise... Dzenitis, Tami Brehse Best Price: $3.88 Buy New $6.50 (as of 12:14 UTC - Details)

It is because we are all deposed kings and queens that we retain, however dimly, memories of what had once been. Why else are we hollowed out on the inside if not to leave room to pine for the world we left behind, the vanished Eden we cannot completely rid our memories of? “The heart is restless,” St. Augustine assures us, “until it finds rest in Thee.” And how does the soul achieve such repose? It is not self-generated, that’s for sure. It is pure gift, due to the overflowing largesse of God. As always, says Eliot, “A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)  
And all shall be well and 
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. 

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