Time past and time future

"Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present"
- T.S. Eliot


Mea Culpa. I am guilty.


As Dr. Smith says, we are all guilty of putting the urgent in front of the important. And I am equally guilty of subjugating the present to the future and the past. If the moment, the instant, contains my end, why do I so easily neglect it?


The title of this blog comes from my most favorite Gerard Manly Hopkins poem, "Spring and Fall to a Young Child." Here is the full text:


Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.


I chose this poem because it reminds me, always, of my own mortality. I'm also drawn to it because of the curious way of knowing that's explained within. Hopkins says that even the soul of a young child can guess at the truths his mind cannot comprehend, suggesting that every person begins life with a tremendous capacity for intuition, for knowing.  Perhaps we learn the words for things more than we learn the things themselves.


My word-smithing skills have grown rusty. Kindly forgive the multifarious errors of composition and construction that this blog will hold as I develop the knack again.


Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.