Four Quartets

I am very thankful for the little green book with the gold lettering that I received from Trinity Forum. It contains an introduction to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, as well as an introduction by Makoto Fujimura.

Recently I confessed to a friend that this set of poems and this poet may be the one I just say “I know who he is and I read some of his works…” and that’s it. For some reason, I have always felt rather intimidated by these poems. It doesn’t help when others I respect talk about how important these words are to them or when I heard Gregory Wolfe speak about the Four Quartets at an I Am conference I was very pregnant and sleeping through most of his words.. But this small book, with excerpts for the poems, seems manageable to me; once I read these I will start over and try the whole thing, maybe I’ll follow along while I listen to T S Elliot (or Jeremy Irons!) reading it. Since I started some time last week, I am still reading I of Burnt Norten - each day I slowly read through it, making sure I know what each line is saying. Today I moved on to III and had to look up words (such as tumid (puffed up) and appetency (longing)).

Sometime this past year, I enjoyed looking through, reading the words of, and attending to the paintings in the book Qu4rtets. (Byron Borger wrote a review of it in 2012.) This book, highlighting the work of Makoto Fujimura, Bruce Herman, Jeremy Begbie, and Christopher Theofanidis and their “Response to T.S. Eliot in Word, Image, and Sound” is gorgeous. We have had it on our bookshelves for a while and, seeing it there, I took it with me to one of my infusions so I could read it. This video also helped me understand more about this Four Quartets project. I found on Bruce Herman’s website this description of the project:

QU4RTETS is a collaborative touring exhibition and performance. The project participants include painters Bruce Herman and Makoto Fujimura, along with Yale composer Christopher Theofanidis––all in concert–– interacting with T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece , “Four Quartets”. The project began in winter of 2009 during a conversation over dinner at the initiative of Walter Hansen. The artists and composer were eventually commissioned to create new paintings and a score for piano and string quartet–in conversation with many others, including the theologian Jeremy Begbie.

The exhibition/concert has been shown and performed at Carnegie Hall; at Baylor, Duke, and Yale universities; at Gordon, Wheaton, Westmont, and Roanoke colleges, and will finish its USA tour at Cairn University, Philadelphia in Spring 2014. The exhibit then begins its international tour: Hong Kong University in September ’14; Kings College Chapel, Cambridge University Easter 2015; finally Hiroshima, Japan later in ’15.

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Walter Wangerin

Anne Bradstreet