The reason I do what I will do.

The title of this blog springs from the following T.S. Eliot quotation, found in one of the final passages of his Little Gidding (Of Four Quartets fame):

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

When I started wondering how to label this project, I turned to this particular poem without knowing what I would find. It's because Little Gidding, one of my favorite poems of all time, has become my anthem to the passage of time and the unending search for the things I will never find. Most of all, it reminds me to keep looking--and keep looking with wonder-- for wisdom and meaning without any promise of finding what I think I want. 

This poem identifies a cycle that returns each of us to the place from which we began. This cycle is filled with smaller cycles; smaller regenerations, smaller endings and beginnings that follow each other without ceasing. As I thought about how each ending is also a beginning, my eyes turned to my graduation peeking over the horizon. In many ways, this semester is one such ending-- one that is also unquestionably a beginning, though of what I can't see now. 

The books I will be reflecting on in this space have been chosen to acknowledge this very cycle. I begin with the Masters of Suspicion: Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. I will be challenged to look at the world through their eyes and take part in their confusions and frustrations with the ordering, meaning, and purpose of our planet. But all the doubt and pain that will come of that project will be followed closely by those whom our curriculum calls "The Good Guys:" Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Eliot, Newman, Lewis. And after that? A far-cast look into the past with books that look far ahead to the future: the Bible's Daniel and Revelation. 

This semester's reading will take me far from my literary home and into the minds of men who are approached with much trepidation by the Christian community. I am preparing to enter, upon graduation, a world where it is Marx, Hume, and Nietzsche-- not Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes-- who are hailed as the greatest philosophers this world has ever known. By looking deeply into the minds of these men, I am coming face to face with the cynicism and hopelessness that so characterize the modern world.

But this is, remember, a cycle; and so I am brought back in the end to the philosophy of those who need not look only into the works of man for the meaning of the universe. After plumbing the depths, I'm not allowed to stay there-- the great cloud of witnesses, those who have fought darkness with more power and eloquence than I could ever muster, will point my gaze upward once again. 

And most appropriately, the Bible is the final text I will study as an undergraduate. I will end not with what man thinks will come of this world, but what man has received through divine revelation as the certain future of this bitter earth. And with this final breath of certainty and eternity, I will make both an end and a beginning: the end of my days as a student at Biola, and the beginning of my unknown days in the wider world. 


So that's part of why the Eliot quote (oh-so-far away now that this post is getting longer) stuck out to me. The other reason, though, is because it reminded me of how I feel about starting this blog. Eliot is pointing out that everything we do-- particularly everything we we write-- is both a beginning and an end. Whatever I choose to do or express represents my final decision after weighing all other options; it is an end of a process. But that ending heralds the birth of a new accountability I am held to by the outward expression of my choices. And my action? He compares it to stepping up to the executioner's block or into a fire. That's pretty serious. And even though these images speak of death, Eliot also assures us that "that is where we start." Again, a beginning and an end. 


I see this blog as a step toward the executioner's block. My thoughts are now open to public scrutiny. I have chosen to publish posts about the books I read, which is both the end of my indecision and the start of my life as a blogger. I have taken action, and it has led me to the death of my private pre-class notes. But this destruction has given me a new place to start from, and even though I can't say where this will take me, I know I'm glad for another beginning.