So here I am, Trying to use words: Consolation from TS Elliott

My blogging efforts have given me an excuse to read more broadly and expand my understanding of the world. This has been very enriching for me personally, and I hope others can enjoy the content too. But with respect to the public-facing aspect of blogging, I feel inadequate in my understanding since I only began this part of my intellectual journey a few years ago and only in my spare time (which is not much). And I feel even more inadequate in my capacity to organize my thoughts into words in a way that will be meaningful to anyone but myself. 

I am not a connoisseur of poetry, but I happened across a stanza from TS Elliott’s Four Quartets that almost perfectly describes my feelings about writing and even my motivation, and offers consolation in my inadequacies compared to much greater intellects who have written on the same topics so much more eloquently in the past.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— 

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which 

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer 

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope 

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions 

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.