The first draft of this project was presented in five installments on Stillwater Symposia, a family-run blog. I waited until after the fifth installment to explain myself:
“There! I have resisted saying anything to you, my family of readers, until after I could give you the whole effort, but now that it is done you deserve a personal explanation.
“This has been an immersion into education, tuition free and at my own pace, and I recommend student mode revivals to everyone. What started as an easy end of day pasttime, keeping me away from online Scrabble and television shows, has become a passion, bringing me to dust off old books on the shelves in my home (Hamlet! The Inferno! Ecclesiastes and Isaiah! And, incidentally, a completely new reading of Nemerov’s Blue Swallows!) and then exploring the greater library of the internet. Without spending a dime, I read all of Plato’s Phlebas and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Hesse’s review of the Brother’s Karamazov. I have not read the whole of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or seen any of Wagner’s Ring cycle, but I certainly delved into these works more than ever before. And I have a whole new reading list for the future: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, for instance, or Mallory’s King Arthur. I was reminded, too, of what Professor Kogan told my English lit class 25 year ago, to go back and read Heart of Darkness at least once every five years or so.
“Meanwhile, I have journeyed through the elements and discovered what the thunder said and traveled the April road from Gethsemane to Emmaus.
“Before this I had kept a deliberate distance from Eliot’s The Waste Land, thinking it too dark and grim, but I have now discovered how unexpectedly positive this poem really is, full of the audacity of hope, if you will, and drawn by the pull towards an incomprehensible peace. In fact, it is the arrival at that peace in one of Eliot’s later poems, Little Gidding, that first led me back to this one. From that 1943 poem, which is about an allegorical English chapel:
...If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying...
“It is, sometimes, in the simple word The Waste Land ends with:
Peace.”
JAV, November 2012
