Nearing the end of 2020, many look forward to closing the book on this difficult year. As the year of COVID, 2020 has taken much: It has claimed over 1.7 million lives, closed hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide and halted nearly everyone’s freedom of movement. For the better part of 2020, we’ve lived with complete uncertainty as to how long the pandemic will last. In this way, 2020 has also taken our sense of future possibility and adventure, in forcing us to live quieter and more insular lives, day to day.

With mass vaccinations underway, people are daring to imagine a return to normal life in 2021, so the end of 2020 is being hailed as a terrible year passing into history. Realistically, little will change as the clock strikes midnight on the 1st of January, or in the months to come. We have a challenging winter to endure, which demands a different approach to observing this new year.

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets - written and published between 1936 and 1942, and winning him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 - offers a blueprint for this challenge. The four poems are interwoven meditations on man’s relationship with time, nature and ultimately the divine, and while the collection is overtly religious - as Eliot was a devout Christian - its message can be understood more secularly. Each ‘quartet’ represents one of the classical elements - air, earth, water, and fire - and is loosely connected to one of the four seasons. As a whole, the collection seeks to collapse the distinctions between past, present and future into an understanding of the self as timeless in salvation. For Eliot, salvation is deliverance from sin through faith; for the secular soul, salvation is more of a reconciling of the self with itself, in the human condition.

T.S. Eliot at his desk in 1944 — TS Eliot at his desk in 1944

In either case - religious or not - time is crucial, as we are all subject to it. In the last part (Part V) of the final quartet, ‘Little Gidding’ - named for a civil parish in Cambridgeshire that Eliot visited, and representing the element of fire - Eliot achieves the unity of time. Written between 1940 and 1942, when Eliot was serving as a watchman during the London blitz, the poem interweaves the imagery of human fire with Pentecostal fire, offering humanity a choice between the bombing and the Holy Spirit (salvation). This chance for redemption begins by blending endings with beginnings:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Eliot goes on to suggest that all our living must be understood in terms of our eventual death:

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.

Imagining that life, ‘the moment of the rose’, and death, ‘the moment of the yew-tree / Are of equal duration’, Eliot suggests a release from the constraints of time in our current state. The poem claims no end to adventure, but rather that life is itself an adventure that eventually returns home:

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.

Eliot ends the poem with a reference to the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, who composed Revelations of Divine Love between the 14th and 15th centuries. With the belief that ‘All shall be well’, Eliot brings all elements together into a sense of peace in the present time and place:

Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Four Quartets is considered Eliot’s masterpiece, and its final lines suggest the culmination of his life’s work in this contribution: Life can be purified in the present. The purgation comes with accepting the continuity of our human condition in time and space.

Related to these philosophical notions is the reality that 2020 has perhaps not been the most terrible in human history, when we recall the horrors of war that people have lived through. That doesn’t mean it has been good, or that we aren’t right to want to leave it in the past. So while we can’t entirely close the book on 2020, we can make it both an end and a start, turn the page and continue the story.