Imagination and Understanding

"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.
..
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind."

Eliot starts the poem with these words and he accomplishes a crap ton with them. I'll probably miss most of it but we've learned that this is because I haven't yet read it several hundred times. (In time I may overcome this. Was that a pun just now?)

The artfully crafted ideas on time with lofty words are better described by you, my classmates. I am convinced of this as I have heard so in numerous presentations thus far. These concepts of time are the very first thing presented in the poem and their presentation is summarized with the image of The Garden. This is an answer before the question is asked. How do we get to The Garden? We get to The Garden through our minds. In both the religious (heaven) and the philosophical/spiritual sense (the ongoing sublime/nirvana) we arrive through awareness and awareness requires thinking with imagination to occur.

Time is a concept which overcomes all barriers including itself. It is first presented with the annoying-yet-sublime "duality contrast" which Eliot uses constantly as a means of description. When we the readers are bombarded by these seemingly opposite and contrasting words, the point of intersection between them is where Eliot is purposefully leading us. Imagination is our bridge to these dots and then again our bridge between them. When we reach these spots in between we are left with two things: first, we have successfully connected his dots thus recognizing his surface patterns and second, we have gained an exceptional understanding about what is in between these points and this largely exceeds the expected limitations of conventional poetry! I think this is why Four Quartets won a Nobel Prize for Literature among other notable distinctions. I have a good example about this which might mean something to you movie buffs.

In The Matrix Reloaded, Neo sits on a park bench with the Oracle. Neo asks the Oracle if he needs to chose whether Trinity lives or dies and the Oracle responds with "You've already made the choice. Now you have to understand it." That line has always bothered me. I felt like more was going with it than I've fully understood, until now. The duality between life and death is really the same thing because of time. Time is the only thing separating life and death yet it's also the only thing which successfully argues life and death can be the same thing (I just won't take it on "faith"). Trinity's life and death are really the same thing according to Eliot and his time arguments. Neo knows these dots and then he needs to understand what's in between them. The Oracle can't just tell him this information for the same reason that Eliot can't just tell us what's in between the dots. It's not about the dots and it's not even about what's in between, it's about UNDERSTANDING the dots and what's between them! This awareness can only occur internally and cannot be passed directly from one person to another. What does that sound like? It sounds like an epiphany.