Thomas Stearns Eliot September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965

T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, was born into a prominent Unitarian family in Saint Louis (1888). He was fond of his childhood, and he liked to watch steamboats going up the Mississippi River. He adored his Irish nurse, Annie, who brought him to church and talked to him about God. He loved to read, especially the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. He was a bird watcher and could identify more than 70 kinds of birds.

But he didn't have many friends as a boy, and he also had trouble making friends at Harvard, where he went to college. He joined some clubs and went to dances and parties here and there. He lifted weights to try to improve his appearance. But in the end, he remained somewhat of a recluse.

After Harvard, Eliot moved to England, where he got a job as a banker. He was a fastidious worker, arriving at 9:30 and leaving at 5:30 every day, working one Saturday every month. He ate lunch every day at the same restaurant, called Baker's Chop House. He met and married a 26-year-old ballet dancer named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. They had known each other for only three months, and didn't ever become completely comfortable with each other. They slept in separate rooms, and Eliot couldn't bring himself to shave in front of her. A few years into their marriage, he joined the Church of England and took a vow of chastity.

From a young age, Eliot wrote about moral decay and getting old and the hopelessness of life, and he expressed those feelings in his most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), a long dark poem about the search for redemption in a post-World War I world.

After he divorced, Eliot had other women who loved him and wanted to marry him. Eliot said that living with a woman was a "nightmare" and something that didn't interest him. But when he was almost 70, he secretly married his 30-year-old secretary, Valerie.

Eliot and his wife were together all the time, and she made him very happy. He never left her side, and he wrote her a letter every week. They sat at home together, playing Scrabble over cheese and Scotch whiskey. His health was failing, but he brought her on a trip to the United States—to Texas and New York and Boston. They went out dancing at a boat party thrown by some Harvard students. He started telling practical jokes and became fond of whoopee cushions and exploding cigars. He wrote a fan letter to Groucho Marx, who wrote back, and the two became close pen pals.

Eliot said, "This last part of my life is the best, in excess of anything I could have deserved."

The Waste-Land published 1922

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

II. A GAME OF CHESS

THE Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

III. THE FIRE SERMON

THE river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank.

IV. DEATH BY WATER

PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell

And the profit and loss.


V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places


Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih



*In my beginning is my end.

*You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, and how, how rare and strange it is, to find in a life composed so much of odds and ends… to find a friend who has these qualities, who has, and gives those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you -without these friendships - life, what cauchemar!

*You are the music while the music lasts.

*What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

*When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except put up with it until the wind changes.

*I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

*If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.

*Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

*Humankind cannot stand very much reality.

*Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

*I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

*Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

*The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

*Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.

*Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

*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.

*Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

*This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Rudyard Kipling, 1865 - 1936

Short-story writer, poet, and novelist (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, India (1865). His father was a British artist who got an appointment to run an art school in Bombay, but after a series of typhoid and cholera outbreaks, Kipling's parents decided to send him back to England for his own safety.

After school, he went off to the northwest corner of India, where the British were fighting a war with Afghanistan. Kipling got a job on an army newspaper, and he also began writing fiction and poetry. After six years of publishing his work, he sold everything he'd written for 250 pounds to a company that began selling paperback editions of his collected works in railway stations around India. Those paperback editions became more successful than anyone had ever expected, and suddenly magazines and newspapers were begging Kipling to write for them. He moved back to London, where he'd become a literary celebrity, but he found the life of a celebrity did not agree with him.

So he traveled the world for a few years, and finally settled in Vermont. And it was there, in a rented cottage surrounded by snow, that he began to reimagine the India of his childhood, and he wrote the book for which he's best known today, The Jungle Book (1894), about a boy raised by wolves who grows up with the other jungle animals until a tiger forces him to go back and live with people.




If


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;
If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run --
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!


*The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

*All the people like us are we, And everyone else is They.

*The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a clever woman to manage a fool”

*If you don't get what you want, it's a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.

*If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

*We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.

*Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears.

*I keep six honest serving men: They taught me all I knew: Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

*Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs.

*Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.

Charles Dickens, 1812 - 1870

The novelist Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England (1812). He grew up in a series of small towns on the southern coast of England, where his father worked as a naval clerk. His mother taught him to read, and he became obsessed with books. He later wrote, "[Reading] was my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life."

When he was 10 years old, his father got a promotion to a job on the outskirts of London. Dickens always remembered leaving the small coastal town where he'd grown up. At the time, London was one of the capitals of the Industrial Revolution, one of the first giant sprawling cities, full of poverty and pollution, crime and mystery. Dickens would go on to describe London as, "The great city ... like a dark shadow on the ground, reddening the sluggish air with a deep dull light, that told of labyrinths of public ways and shops, and swarms of busy people. ... Sounds arose — the striking of church clocks, the distant bark of dogs, the hum of traffic in the streets ... tall steeples looming in the air, and piles of unequal roofs oppressed by chimneys."

Dickens' father had been gathering debts for years, struggling more and more to pay them. Charles was 12 years old when his parents decided he could help the family financially if he took a job at Warren's Blacking Company, a manufacturer of boot blacking that was run by a friend of the family.

A few days after he started the job, Dickens' father was arrested for debt. Dickens was devastated. It was then that he decided that he would do whatever it took to make sure that he was never poor again. In his spare time, he began writing sketches of the people imprisoned with his father, and then began to write about other ordinary people on the streets of London, the cabdrivers, shoe shiners, pickpockets, and clowns.

Dickens eventually got a job as a journalist and began writing fiction, and he went on to become the most popular writer of his lifetime. But he also became a publishing entrepreneur by inventing a remarkably successful new form of publishing, selling his novels in serial installments. Because he couldn't wait to write a whole book before he started getting paid for it, he published each new chapter as soon as it was finished.

Most critics agree that Dickens' first real masterpiece was his most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield (1850).

Dickens' reputation among critics declined after his death. His work was considered too melodramatic and moralistic. But his reputation was revived by the critic G.K. Chesterton, and since 1950, more has been written about Dickens each year than about any other author in the English language except Shakespeare.

*A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

*Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

*There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

*A heart well worth winning, and well won. A heart that, once won, goes through fire and water for the winner, and never changes, and is never daunted.

*It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . . it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . . in short, the period was so far like the present period . . . .

*I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

*Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.

*No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.

*Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

*Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.

*Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.

*With affection beaming out of one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.

*It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

A Tale of Two Cities

*Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.
David Copperfield, 1849

*We need never be ashamed of our tears.
Great Expectations