[Poem] Little Gidding - T. S. Eliot

"Four Quartets" is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. "The Little Gidding" is the last of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. The poems were not collected until Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943. They were first published as a series in Great Britain in 1944 towards the end of Eliot's poetic career. Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. (from Wikipedia.org)

"There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: 

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment 

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference 

Which resembles the others as death resembles life, 

Being between two lives"

**

"What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from."

**

"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."

**

"Through the unknown, unremembered gate 

When the last of earth left to discover 

Is that which was the beginning; 

At the source of the longest river 

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for 

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always-- 

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded 

Into the crowned knot of fire 

And the fire and the rose are one."

[Oyun] Six Characters in Search of an Author - Luigi Pirandello

An absurdist metatheatrical play about the relationship between authors, their characters, and theatre practitioners: Six Characters in Search of an Author. Italian novelist, dramatist and short story author Luigi Pirandello was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921. The original language of the play in Italian is Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore.

- Life is full of all sorts of odd things which have no need at all to pretend to be real because they are actually true.

- What the devil are you talking about?

- What I'm saying is that you really must be mad to do things the opposite way round: to create situations that obviously aren't true and try to make them seem to be really happening. But then I suppose that sort of madness is the only reason for your profession.

**

- Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

- All right then: but where does all this get us?

- Nowhere. I want to try to show you that one can be thrust into life in many ways, in many forms: as a tree or a stone, as water or butterfly - or as a woman. It might even be as a character in a play.

**

- Perhaps you are not used to seeing the characters created by an author spring into life up here on the stage face to face with each other. Perhaps it's because we're not in a script?

**

- Words, words! When we're faced by something we don't understand, by a sense of evil that seems as if it's going to swallow us, don't we all find comfort in a word that tells us nothing but that calms us?

**

- We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself too. We think we understand each other: but we never do.

**

- If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing.

**

- This is the real drama for me; the belief that we all, you see, think of ourselves as one single person: but it's not true: each of us is several different people, and all these people live inside us. With one person we seem like this and with another we seem very different. But we always have the illusion of being the same person for everybody and of always being the same person in everything we do.

**

- Believe me, sir, I am a character who has not been fully developed dramatically.

**

- I only act, as everyone does, the part in life that he's chosen for himself, or that others have chosen for him. And you can see that sometimes my own passion gets a bit out of hand, a bit theatrical, as it does with all of us.

[Oyun] Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

An absurdist play by Irish novelist, playwright, theater director and poet Samuel Beckett... He was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. He wrote both in French and English. Waiting for Godot is his own translation into English from French original En attendant Godot.

- Nothing you can do about it.

- No use struggling.

- One is what one is.

- No use wriggling.

- The essential doesn't change.

- Nothing to be done.

**

- The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.

**

- We are happy.

- We are happy. What do we do now, now that we are happy?

- Wait for Godot. Things have changed here since yesterday.

- And if he doesn't come?

- We'll see when the time comes. I was saying that things have changed here since yesterday.

- Everything oozes.

- Look at the tree.

- It's never the same pus from one second to the next.

- The tree, look at the tree.

- Was it not there yesterday?

**

- Is it possible you've forgotten already?

- That's the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget.

**

- In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.

- You're right, we're inexhaustible.

- It's so we won't think.

- We have that excuse.

- It's so we won't hear.

- We have our reasons.

- All the dead voices.

- They make a noise like wings.

- Like leaves.

- Like sand.

- Like leaves.

[...]

- They all speak at once.

- Each one to itself.

[...]

- Rather they whisper.

- They rustle.

- They murmur.

- They rustle.

[...]

- What do they say?

- They talk about their lives.

- To have lived is not enough for them.

- They have to talk about it.

- To be dead is not enough for them.

- It is not sufficient.

**

- Thinking is not the worst. [...] What is terrible is to have thought.

**

- We met yesterday. Do you not remember?

- I don't remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow I won't remember having met anyone today.  So don't count on me to enlighten you.

**

- Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?

[Oyun] The Flies - Jean-Paul Sartre

He is among the first names coming to mind when we say French Literature. He refused to take Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. From French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies (Les Mouches)...

"You need our nails to score your skin, our teeth to bite your breast and all our savage love to save you from your hatred of yourself. Only the suffering of your body can take your mind off your suffering soul. So come and let us hurt you."

**

"Neither slave nor master. I am my freedom. No sooner had you created me than I ceased to be yours."

**

"You are God and I am free; each of us is alone, and our anguish is akin."