Sunday, August 10, 2025

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing (T.S Elliot, Four Quatrets)

 





I went to the funeral of a mentor and friend exactly half a century after we met.

At the airport I recalled moments of our working together around the world. The vast communication we maintained about the arts, sharing our writings, paintings and sculpture. We published scientific works together and for decades taught two generations of public health students.

The last year of his life he did not recall who I was.

… While waiting for my flight back, I recalled the lines from T.S Elliot in “East Coker” about waiting without hope. I had read these lines before when faced with the dilemma of acceptance. And in the stillness of my await in an airport where all around me were eager to return to homes and the familiar scent of a warm bed were their siren song, I thought about all that I had found in waiting. Even though I was an explorer, carrying my body over continents or when, in the stillness of moments, letting my mind take flight.

But I have always engaged with the moment, and often engaged the moment in the process of waiting. Now, I found T.S Elliot’s “East Coker” perfect for my returning from a funeral.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wing cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

 

… It was at this moment of reflection when a woman sat in front of me, took her phone out of her bag and in a prostrate position stared at her phone for a long while. In await. For a message to come through. Perhaps for a promise or an apology.

 

And the last lines from the “East Coker” took on a whole new reality.

 

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;

wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

 But the faith and the love are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

 

 

August 10, 2025

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025


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