echo of a tune we have not heard
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what … Read more
Different kind of failure
Page 163, about Eliot’s conversion: “For in poetry, belief need play no part; and, within Eliot’s own work, the structure of orthodox faith and the language or devotion are broken apart in order to make room for something much stranger and more tenuous, like the sound of someone crying in an empty church.” From the … Read more
