The Self in Time: Eliot’s Ritual of Becoming
T.S. Elliot's Four Quartets
Intro
In a habitual pensive train of thought, I decided to capture a few reflections on one of art’s many purposes: to serve as an emotive anchor in our transitory lives.
The most haunting thing art can do is show you the version of yourself you abandoned. This is because good art isn’t just a window into someone else’s experience — it’s also a mirror that reflects back the paths we chose not to take. When we witness a character suffering a regret that echoes our own, or see a painting that captures the longing we once felt, something inside us moves.
We recognize a moment in our history when we stood at a crossroads and marched forward, leaving behind an older dream or a jejune hope.
Art dredges up that half-forgotten version of who we were, forcing us to confront the truth that we never completely stopped being that person. We merely went on without them.
Even so, there’s a sense in which that self is gone for good. Even if echoes of it remain within us, we’ve changed enough that the old frame of mind feels foreign… like a memory belonging to someone else. It’s a paradox like the Ship of Theseus: if every plank is replaced over time, does the ship retain its original identity, or has it become something else entirely?
We too, replace pieces of ourselves as we move forward, eschewing certain illusions or ambitions while collecting new scars and victories.
The self we encounter through art is both intimately familiar and disturbingly distant: part of us always, yet unrecognizable in certain lights.
This duality is what makes art so powerful and so unsettling. It probes not only the visible surface of our lives but the deep interior terrain — the swirl of fears, possibilities, and regrets lying beneath. It forces us to consider whether we truly “killed off” a part of ourselves or simply packed it away. We can’t escape the question: if we are always in flux, is there anything constant that defines us, or is every version merely a phase? That tension, between wanting to see ourselves as a coherent identity and acknowledging the ever-shifting nature of our being, gives art its uncanny power.
It holds up a reflection in which we spot traces of who we once were, inviting us to decide how much of that lingers, and how much we’re willing to leave behind. This is why a particular piece of art may feel more poignant at a certain point in our journey. It serves as a temporary anchor for this transient version of self.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets performs this exact sleight of hand with time. It frames our own shifting identities in poetic ritual, dredging up echoes of former selves even as it propels us forward. Written in the shadow of World War II and after Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism, the poem marries personal history, spiritual confession, and philosophical paradox. By weaving together the Ship of Theseus dilemma, Buddhist notions of ego-death, Christian sacrament, and the “music” of language itself, Eliot invites us to ask: if every plank of our lives is replaced over time, do we remain the same vessel? Only by inhabiting time’s currents and returning to its anchor points can we glimpse what endures beneath our phases of being?
The Paradox of Time in Four Quartets
Eliot’s Burnt Norton opens on a moment that feels both suspended and inexorable: a “still point of the turning world.” How can stillness exist in a realm defined by ceaseless motion? Yet, it is precisely in that suspension that Eliot reveals time’s deepest secret.
As he writes:
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.”
In this Möbius like formulation, every instant folds upon every other: yesterday’s regret bleeds into tomorrow’s promise, while tomorrow’s unknown fate shadows today’s choices. It’s a temporal Möbius strip where no moment is ever wholly new or wholly gone. This collapse of past, present, and future mirrors art’s power to dissolve and rekindle our sense of personal chronology.
Just like Proust’s narrator, tasting a madeleinne dipped in tea, finds himself swept back into the sunlit streets of Combray, so Eliot’s “still point” arrests us in a flash of total awareness: memory, expectation, and possibility converge, and time becomes not a river we traverse but a sweeping landscape we inhabit.
The Abandoned Self & the Ship of Theseus
If our identities are ships rebuilt through every decision, then memory is the one component that insists on staying. In East Coker, Eliot returns to images first glimpsed in Burnt Norton: fire, ash, earthen clay, and asks whether they remain the same after passing through recollection:
“And what might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.”
Here, the “perpetual possibility” is that castoff self, still hovering within us. Those past selves; defined by youthful ambition, old wounds, or discarded dreams still echo in the present. Memory, though unreliable, fuses them into a feeling of continuity.
It reminds us of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks — it can resurrect the lonely ache of a late-night diner, Eliot’s motifs act as reminders: we never fully discard our old versions; we evolve around them. The paradox deepens when he writes in The Dry Salvages,
“We shall not cease from exploration… And know the place for the first time.”
Exploration demands both departure and return. The ship is changed, but the wonder of life remains.
Between Renunciation & Assertion
Eliot threads Eastern mysticism into his Christian lyric, staging a dialogue between self‑nullification and self‑affirmation. In Little Gidding, he summons the purifying fire of sacrament and the ashes of renunciation to evoke Buddhist detachment: an ego‑death that frees the spirit from worldly fetters.
“If blood will wash away my fault
Then it must do so in my lifetime.”
Here, the speaker confronts transgression not as abstract guilt but as a burden to be consumed and transformed in the present moment. The echo of Buddhist vipassanā: seeing through the illusions of self resonates in Eliot’s insistence that salvation, like illumination, happens here and now, in the conflagration of memory & desire.
However, this impulse toward dissolution is immediately counterpoised by a fierce celebration of being. At the heart of the poem rings an affirmation of presence evocative of its own kind of ritual:
“We are the music while the music lasts.”
Music, for Eliot, is the very breath of existence: ephemeral, irreducible, but charged with all the weight of lived experience. It is an affirmation that even as we surrender ego and illusion, we cannot escape the fact of our own voice, our own pulse of consciousness - ultimately, our own meaning. This line insists that life’s worth is measured not in permanence but in the intensity of each passing note.
Eliot dramatizes these two poles: renunciation and assertion, as voices in a fugue, weaving surrender and insistence into a single contrapuntal tapestry. Like a musical fugue, the poem layers motifs of fire and ash, voice and silence, until we sense that true liberation lies not in choosing one over the other but in holding both in creative, living tension - no matter how ambiguous.
To dissolve the self is to make room for deeper presence; to assert the self is to acknowledge the miracle of existence itself.
In that paradoxical embrace, Four Quartets becomes a vessel for spiritual alchemy transforming loss into grace, negation into affirmation, and time’s ceaseless flux into a finite sacred moment.
Ritual as Anchor - Upanishads, Liturgy & Sound
Eliot’s Four Quartets is structured like an ancient ritual cycle, and at its center beats the pulse of the Upanishads. These texts mark the inward-turning culmination of Vedic literature: meditative dialogues on Brahman and Atman, whose unity can only be grasped through spiritual discipline, inner inquiry, and contemplative realization. By guiding the reader through ritual repetitions: śravaṇa (hearing), manana (reflecting), nididhyāsana (dwelling) — the texts dissolve the illusion of a separate self and reveal the timeless Self that underlies all change.
Eliot channels this method in the quartet’s four‑part architecture. Each section functions like a khaṇḍa in an Upanishadic teaching, where returning again and again deepens transformation. Consider the way he casts memory as a sutra of possibility:
“And what might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.”
Every line feels pared to its essence, much like a Vedic sutra, then unpacked through repeated encounters. As we cycle through Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, we practice Eliot’s own form of śravaṇa: attentive listening to the text’s rhythms; manana: pondering how each image reshapes our sense of time; and nididhyāsana: allowing its cadences to settle into our being.
But Eliot’s pilgrimage does not stop at Eastern practice. Having recently embraced Anglicanism, he weaves Christian sacrament into this Upanishadic frame. At Little Gidding, Eucharistic fire becomes the forge of the soul, binding past transgressions to present grace. That same spirit of chant echoes in lines like:
“Praise the mountains, praise the rivers, praise the sun…
Praise for the ages and the woes of the ages.”
In this confluence of Vedic chant, Christian hymn, and poetic liturgy, Four Quartets itself becomes a living Upanishad: a text to be inhabited. Each return trip through its “waypoints” invites us to recognize that the Self Eliot evokes; the unchanging witness beneath life’s flux has been present in each breath, each moment all along.
Artful Reflection & the Question of Persistence
Art unearths the residue of who we were, challenging us to decide what remains. Eliot’s recurring symbols: roses, ash, rivers don’t merely serve as static metaphors. In Burnt Norton, the rose garden shimmers with untapped possibility; by Little Gidding, its echo is something mourned and lost. When Eliot returns to the image, it carries the weight of every prior visitation:
“The rose garden is empty.”
That emptying isn’t absence. It is the imprint of all the times we walked among those blooms, choosing some paths and forsaking others. Like returning to an old house, now altered but still somehow familiar; the walls may have shifted, but the shape of memory remains in the stones.
Ash moves from East Coker’s burial pit to the purifying fire of Little Gidding. Once a symbol of forgetfulness and decay, it becomes the very material of renewal:
“If death should be so gentle, that there appear
No cairn, no ring, no marker of our fear,
Save us, the marble, that is not our own.”
Here, Eliot asks whether continuity is an illusion, or whether some pulse endures beneath every change. The ash both erases and anchors.
And the river in The Dry Salvages? It flows onward, yet Eliot listens for its return:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Each return to Four Quartets is a reckoning: what have we retained, what reshaped, what willingly relinquished? Like art itself, the poem is a living archive of becoming. In that act of remembrance and release, we discover whether persistence lies in the symbols themselves, or in the hush that holds them between each breath of verse.
Finis
Eliot’s masterwork is both map and mirror for a self in transition. By staging time as paradox — both fluid and still, he shows that only through ritual, through art, can we trace the threads of what might be constant. Like all great art, Four Quartets pauses us midstream and asks: which parts of ourselves are scaffolding, and which are soul? Which memories define us, and which are now only echoes?
And perhaps that’s the greatest grace of the poem. It doesn’t resolve the paradox. It does however, make it beautiful enough to live with…at least for now.
