- It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.
- Resign yourself to be the fool you are.
- You will find that you survive humiliation
- And that’s an experience of incalculable value.
- That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost
- The desires for all that was most dersirable,
- Before you are contented with what you can desire;
- Before you know what is left to be desired;
- And you go on wishing that you could desire
- What desire has left behind. But you cannot understand.
- How could you understand what it is to feel old?
- We die to each other daily.
- What we know of other people
- Is only our memory of the moments
- During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
- To pretend that they and we are the same
- Is a useful and convenient social convention
- Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember
- That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
- What is hell? Hell is oneself.
- Hell is alone, the other figures in it
- Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
- And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
- Half the harm that is done in this world
- Is due to people who want to feel important.
- They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.
- Or they do not see it, or they justify it
- Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
- To think well of themselves.
- There are several symptoms
- Which must occur together, and to a marked degree,
- To qualify a patient for my sanitorium:
- And one of them is an honest mind. That is one of the causes of their suffering.
- To men of a certain type
- The suspicion that they are incapable of loving
- Is as disturbing to their self-esteem
- As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
- I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me —
- Because, if there isn’t then there’s something wrong,
- Or at least, very different from what it seemed to be,
- With the world itself — and that’s much more frightening!
- Everyone’s alone — or so it seems to me.
- They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;
- They make faces, and think they understand each other.
- And I’m sure they don’t. Is that a delusion?
- Can we only love
- Something created in our own imaginations?
- Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable?
- Then one is alone, and if one is alone
- Then lover and beloved are equally unreal
- And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.
- I shall be left with the inconsolable memory
- Of the treasure I went into the forest to find
- And never found, and which was not there
- And is perhaps not anywhere? But if not anywhere
- Why do I feel guilty at not having found it?
- Disillusion can become itself an illusion
- If we rest in it.
- Two people who know they do not understand each other,
- Breeding children whom they do not understand
- And who will never understand them.
- There is another way, if you have the courage.
- The first I could describe in familiar terms
- Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it,
- Illustrated, more or less, in lives of those about us.
- The second is unknown, and so requires faith —
- The kind of faith that issues from despair.
- The destination cannot be described;
- You will know very little until you get there;
- You will journey blind. But the way leads towards possession
- Of what you have sought for in the wrong place.
- We must always take risks. That is our destiny.
- If we all were judged according to the consequences
- Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention
- And beyond our limited understanding
- Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.
- Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.
- Every moment is a fresh beginning.
- The Cocktail Party (1949), T.S Eliot
The Cocktail Party
The URI to TrackBack this entry is: https://idreamofralphfiennes.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/the-cocktail-party/trackback/
Whether does the table feel flattered? So a nonsense: Objects cannot feel. If he anticipated what women think up thus everything to be able to be in daydreaming with him, he would get up and knock down the poor table. The table is able to do nothing for it. Just as the tree nothing for the fact is able to do that one made from him exactly that table which HE used. I do not want to be any table or tree, I know that also me am unique like YOU. After my death one will give me no sad, poems full of longing in the grave and one will also not kill himself because of me. Only want to hope that there are not women later – or girls – who commit suicide with your death news to be even closer in hope, to you then this would be then the fateful love and he would not even know it. Thus everybody lives then his life.