‘The growing terror of nothing to think about’

Today, I reread T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. In “East Coker”, I was struck by this stanza:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
(“East Coker”, III.23-28)

He precedes this with ‘you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about’ (III.20-21)

The answer to this dread of monotony is perhaps then to ‘be still’, to allow monotony for some time, for ‘there is yet faith, / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.’

Thought of the Day

In “East Coker”, ‘behind every face the mental emptiness deepen[s] / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about’ (III.20-21) The answer to this dread of monotony is perhaps then to ‘be still’, to allow monotony for some time, for ‘there is yet faith, / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.’ (III.25-26)

- Gabriela Milkova