Farthest away, and surrounding all, is the sphere where God dwells, unimaginable to us, in the center of a celestial Rose.Īll human activity, Eliot seems to be saying, (especially creative activity) is doomed to fall short. Soaring ove the earth are succfessively more excellent planetary spheres guided by angelic Intelligences. The same image is part of the Medieval picture of the universe as represented by Dante: the earth is at the bottom of the universe, with Hall at its center. Thus the Creator created leserbeings, who created lesser beings, which finally led us into this mess we call reality. Existence is equivalent to actuality.Įssence/descent: Another Platonic (this time Neo-Platonic) formulation, The Essence is the Idea, which descends, step by step, until it becomes actual. Potency/Existence: Potency is Aristotelian for potential. In between desire and orgasm is what Eliot thought of as the messiness of actual sexual activity. In the Japanese martial arts, the warrior is supposed to strike the opponent during this gap-when he has thought of attacking, but has not moved yet.īetween the desire and the spasm-hey, we’re talking about sex here.
I think that this is a gap of longing.īetween the conception and the creation between the emotion and how we act in response to the emotion.
So: There is a gap between the idea and the reality īetween the movement and the completion-the finished act-there is a gap. I think that this notion is crossed with a Hindu/Buddhist/Zen notion of a void or gap: Or Shelley: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass/Stains the bright radiance of Eternity/Till Death shatters it to fragments.” “Things below are copies…” as Yeats wrote. thesis on the Idealist philosopher Bradley? That means he was strongly interested in Idealism, the view that the Ideas are the true reality, and that the world we live in contains copies or shadows of the Ideas. One possible interpretation is that Eliot is talking about that other interim state between death and life not at the end of our lives, but at the beginning. I’m working from memory here, but didn’t Eliot do his Ph.D. Yes, an old question, but I’m glad I ran into it so that I can think it through.
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