The Obsession with Four Quartets and the Illusion of Time
I didn’t get much reading done this week outside of my continued attempts at exhausting Four Quartets.
I’m reading it one hundred times, a literary experiment in immersion, trying to let the text seep into me, to write through it, with it, against it.
Its recursive structure has begun to shape my own thoughts, as if each section of my week was echoing some prior moment in time, reshaped, reframed, re-experienced.
One of its most dominant themes—man’s relationship to time—has taken on an obsessive significance for me.
Time in work. Time in failure.
Time in the process of becoming.
But more than that, I’ve started to see the poem’s emphasis on humility as the foundation of wisdom, something that resonates with a question I’ve long struggled with: how to define my own values.
The Deception of Truth: Nietzsche, Perspective, and the Fragility of Belief
Nietzsche’s perspectivism was my first great confrontation with the instability of truth, with the idea that all we ever possess are partial truths, viewpoints distorted by the curvature of our own experience.
Like the blind men in the parable, each touching a different part of the elephant, convinced that their small fragment is the whole.
It’s a notion that once enthralled me—the radical subjectivity of perception.
But as time moves on, I wonder if it is also a kind of trap, an endless hall of mirrors where each reflection only affirms itself.
I used to see my own point of view as the closest thing to truth I could access, but I no longer trust it so easily.
Love and the Lies We Tell Ourselves
I’ve seen this idea play out most acutely in my personal relationships, particularly in love.
Two women I loved, two relationships that unraveled, not through any clear malice, but through a kind of tragic misalignment.
It was as if they were not seeing me at all but rather reenacting past wounds, projecting ghosts of men who came before me.
And I did the same.
We could have taken lie detector tests and passed them, believing in our own versions of events with total sincerity, and yet both of us would have been completely wrong.
This is the danger of perspective: it defends itself. It distorts, not out of deception, but out of necessity.
And that distortion, if unchecked, leads to a kind of break with reality that takes years to untangle.
If there is a correction for this, it is only in humility.
To admit, always, the limits of my own perception.
To know that what I see is only a sliver of the real.
Related Posts:
Four Quartets and the Reconciliation of Perspective
This, I think, is what Eliot attempts in Four Quartets: a reconciliation.
A movement beyond the arrogance of perspective into something more fluid, more open.
He does it formally as well, shifting from dense philosophical reflection into stark, unadorned fact.
I started reading this book when I was twenty, and in that imitation-obsessed phase of early writing, I picked up this maneuver from him—the juxtaposition of the abstract with the brutally direct.
I remember the first poem I wrote in this mode, a direct homage to Eliot, though I lost the memory of its origins over time.
Now, rereading Four Quartets in this exhaustive way, I see the fingerprints he left on my own work, the way certain stylistic tics embedded themselves in my writing over the years.
Eliot said that immature poets imitate and mature poets steal. If that’s true, then somewhere along the way, I stole from him, and only now am I realizing the full extent of the theft.
Ghost Dog: The Tragic Absurdity of Outdated Codes
Outside of my recursive readings of Eliot, I did manage to watch a few films this week, one of which was Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.
Jim Jarmusch’s film is a meditation on honor, entropy, and the absurdity of outdated codes in a world that no longer values them.
The protagonist, Ghost Dog, lives by the Hagakure, the ancient Samurai code, serving a mafia boss who neither understands nor respects his devotion.
His unwavering loyalty feels like a relic from another time, a system of meaning in a world that has moved on without it.
The Slow Decay of Meaning: Ghost Dog and the Collapse of Tradition
What struck me most about Ghost Dog was its deep existential absurdity.
The mafia, once feared, is reduced to bumbling incompetents glued to their television screens, lost in nostalgia.
Ghost Dog himself exists as an anachronism, a Black man following a centuries-old Japanese code while working for an Italian-American crime family.
His closest friend, Raymond, speaks only French, and yet they communicate perfectly.
Meaning exists, not in language, but in something deeper.
There is something tragic but inevitable about Ghost Dog’s fate.
He follows his code to the end, knowing that it no longer holds weight in the world.
His death isn’t so much a loss as it is the final act in a story that could never have ended any other way.
Systems decay, traditions collapse, and entropy moves everything toward disorder.
But within that collapse, within the absurdity of an aging mafia boss watching Itchy & Scratchy while ordering a hit on a Samurai assassin, there is also a kind of humor.
A recognition that the death of systems does not mean the death of meaning itself, only that meaning must be reconstituted in new forms.
Ghost Dog is not a tragedy, nor a triumph.
It is an acknowledgment of the inevitable.
The Uncertain Truth in Obsession and Attention
And perhaps that is what Four Quartets is as well.
Not an answer, but an attempt.
A movement toward meaning in the face of time’s dissolution.
I don’t know if reading it one hundred times will bring me closer to anything, but if nothing else, it is an exercise in attention.
And attention, I am beginning to suspect, is the closest thing to truth I will ever grasp.
Ready to burn your default thinking? Download Dangerous by Design. Discover the 10 books that fracture, interrupt, and rewire the creative mind. Get the guide & read dangerously.
Pingback: Love, Obsession, and the Lie We Tell Ourselves About Desire - Samuel Gilpin