Leisure

A friend put me on to this Thought for the Day I would otherwise have missed, from Radio 4's Today programme, broadcast this summer on 21st August. It is a timely reflection, in three pithy minutes, on leisure! We have lost sight of the true meaning of leisure in these hectic disordered times. Tim Stanley refers to Joseph Pieper's remarkable book, published just after the War, called Leisure, the Basis Of Culture, which I recommend very strongly. He gets a lot into a short work. Let's not lose sight of being-at-leisure.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1er9m4Shlm8nvY0bznrUfGQ8q6__ev64T/view?usp=sharing

'The Hollow Men' by T. S. Eliot

The Hollow Men


Mistah Kurtz - he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
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.

The Hollow Men - spoken

T. S. Eliot

Synchronicity... In two conversations, with two friends, over the past two days, T. S. Eliot came up. So I followed the golden thread to one of my favourite poems, the incredibly deep and powerful The Hollow Men. It can only strike a chord in us today, as it has since its creation following on from The Waste Land. Although a dark poem, facing the fragmentation and sometimes apparent meaninglessness of modern life and the modern world, at the same time it brings us light. We are made starkly aware of our hollow selves on the edge of the abyss created by our collective disconnection from perennial sources of transcendence. Broken verse, snatches of nursery rhymes, unfinished lines from the Lord's Prayer...

Here are two very different readings! One by the poet himself. Do not be put off by his rather antiquated mannered speech, the solemn recitation in Eliot's own unique anglo-American accent. Perhaps only the poet himself can touch in his own voice the depths of his creation, however imperfect the rendering. 

And the other, possibly more accessible;  Marlon Brando as Kurz, reciting the poem in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now. 

On this eve of another school year in a time of global crisis, reflections from J. Krishnamurti on education:

Life is a well of deep waters. One can come to it with small buckets and draw only a little water, or one can come with large vessels, drawing plentiful waters that will nourish and sustain. While one is young is the time to investigate, to experiment with everything. The school should help its young people to discover their vocations and responsibilities, and not merely cram their minds with facts and technical knowledge; it should be the soil in which they can grow without fear, happily and integrally.

To educate a child is to help him to understand freedom and integration. To have freedom there must be order, which virtue alone can give; and integration can take place only when there is great simplicity. From innumerable complexities we must grow to simplicity; we must become simple in our inward life and in our outward needs.

Education is at present concerned with outward efficiency, and it utterly disregards, or deliberately perverts, the inward nature of man; it develops only one part of him and leaves the rest to drag along as best it can. Our inner confusion, antagonism and fear ever overcome the outer structure of society, however nobly conceived and cunningly built. When there is not the right kind of education we destroy one another, and physical security for every individual is denied. To educate the student rightly is to help him to understand the total process of himself; for it is only when there is integration of the mind and heart in everyday action that there can be intelligence and inward transformation.

While offering information and technical training, education should above all encourage an integrated outlook on life; it should help the student to recognize and break down in himself all social distinctions and prejudices, and discourage the acquisitive pursuit of power and domination. It should encourage the right kind of self-observation and the experiencing of life as a whole, which is not to give significance to the part, to the "me" and the "mine," but to help the mind to go above and beyond itself to discover the real.

Freedom comes into being only through self-knowledge in one's daily occupations, that is, in one's relationship with people, with things, with ideas and with nature. If the educator is helping the student to be integrated, there can be no fanatical or unreasonable emphasis on any particular phase of life. It is the understanding of the total process of existence that brings integration.

From Education and the Significance of Life, Chapter 2: "The right kind of education"

Click on the link below to read Kathleen Raine's essay on "Global Unity and the Arts"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14FraNNSwbrfLG2NoQY_gfXp-kysRzWLv/view?usp=sharing

Interesting thoughts in our times of global connection and mass information, when we need meaning and values above mere accumulation of facts, and quality above mere quantity, recalling T. S. Eliot's words:

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

A brief introduction to one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century

Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) 

The Collected Poems have just been published by Faber & Faber:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Collected-Poems-Kathleen-Raine/dp/0571352022/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=kathleen+raine+faber&qid=1566731743&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Kathleen Raine is one of the most distinguished writers of our time. Born in 1908, she lived through the upheavals of the twentieth century and knew some of its most illustrious men and woman of letters, including T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, St John Perse and Ted Hughes.

 

She spent some of the most formative years of her childhood in a remote Northumberland hamlet, and although a poet at heart, chose to read botany and zoology in the Cambridge of the 1920s “because nature was my theme”. Recognised as one of the leading scholars of William Blake and W. B. Yeats, she has left behind a body of critical work and literary essays of immense significance. Yet it is foremost as a poet that she lived, publishing several collections of visionary verse in which she expresses the numinous qualities of daily life that the modern world has largely forgotten.

Her faithfulness to this vision kept Kathleen Raine on the margins of the literary and university establishment, which had placed itself under what she always considered to be the domination of materialist ideology, and so cut off from the timeless traditions which have given us the greatest productions of Western art. Yet this same faithfulness, and determination, led her to co-found the journal Temenos in 1980, leading in turn to the Temenos Academy, launched in 1990, whose Patron is the Prince of Wales. The Academy is now a teaching organisation based in London, devoted to the learning of the Imagination, both of East and West and the understanding of tradition as continual renewal. The many publications include the Temenos Academy Review. The year's programme of lectures can be found here (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OpejU1veAX9dmXkcMgTSfjuzfETZF0bB/view?usp=sharing) and on the Temenos Academy site (https://www.temenosacademy.org/). The site also contains an extensive audio archive of lectures, as well as information about the newly created two-year diploma course on the Perennial Philosophy.