Quotations and Experience

[Lady Julian]

Your quote reminds me of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

Quote:There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

Eliot is confusing (he's just being Eliot!), but he emphasizes throughout his poetry that what we "believe" is "the most reliable" is usually not reliable at all, and we have to "renounce" it to move forward in our spiritual life.

Later in the Four Quartets he feels

Quote:the shame
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

So applicable. I can think of so many things that I "once . . . took for exercise of virtue" that I am now ashamed of.

This is why I like reading (and talking about) poetry: I like finding that other people have experienced what I have experienced, and have put that experience into words.

P.S. I do not apologize for the geeky reference to T.S. Eliot. This just comes with having my M.A. in English literature.