Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

I open today’s #stampoftheday post with these famous lines that start T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” because Eliot was (somewhat amazingly) honored on a 22-cent U.S. postage stamp issued on September 26, 1988, 100 years after he was born in St. Louis.
Let us go then, you and I, on a quick journey about Eliot and this stamp.

Start with the stamp itself. It was among the many loose plate blocks that were part of my late father’s stamp collection.

Now consider my father. Why was he was buying plate blocks in 1988, almost two decades after he stopped mounting stamps, plate blocks, and first-day covers in one of his carefully curated albums? What did he think would happen to these stamps, which he kept buying and tossing, in no systematic way, into manila envelopes and folders? I suppose he thought that someday he’d mount them as carefully as he did when he was younger. But I never heard him talk about it. So it will have to remain a mystery.

Next, is the question of why I set this stamp aside. I’ve been through those loose stamps; I use many of these for fun on the rare occasions when I mail something to a friend. But I set some stamps aside, including this one, when felt a connection to the topic, enjoyed something about the design, or thought someone I knew might like them. I set the Eliot stamp aside in part because I was amused by the idea of celebrating him in a stamp and in part because, while I’ve never been much for poetry, Eliot’s poems, particularly the “Four Quartets,” touched me deeply when I read them in my late teens or early 20s.

It’s been years since I’ve read them, though, which made me wonder what I would see and hear and feel when I read them now, when I’m in my 60s. I confess I didn’t feel the transcendence that I (think) I remember feeling when I read these poems so many years ago. But I still saw sand felt their crystalline clarity.

And finally, can I say anything intelligent about his oft-read poetry? It is, of course, pretty daunting to write something intelligent and insightful about Eliot. So instead, I offer you a few lines that struck me as particularly powerful. They come from the end of “Little Gidding” the fourth of the Quartets, which was written in 1942, when Eliot was living in London, which was being regularly bombed by German planes. I particularly love the following four lines:

“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.”

And, I am struck by the rest of the stanza and the one that follows, which ends the poem.

“Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
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 flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”

When I slow down, and take the time to read, and re-read these lines, and pause to really take them in, I do, in fact, continue to find them to be as powerful as I remembered. Perhaps you will have the same experience.

Be well, stay safe, do not cease from exploration, fight for justice, work for peace and, I hope, “all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”