Burnt Norton

Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot begins with the words: “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.” 

My mama always said to us children, “let’s redeem the time,” whenever she hoped for a task to be completed promptly. She hoped we would not dilly-dally about our chore, and yet she was saying more than simply, “hurry up.” She was saying something, maybe not consciously, about time itself. She believed it could be redeemed. The idea that time can be “redeemed” is an assumption that time is a thing, an object that can be held, quantified, contained.

The first section of Burnt Norton contains an empty garden with roses that “had the look of flowers that are looked at.” It  contains an empty alley, an empty pool. And then the bird says, “go, go, go” because “human kind/ cannot bear very much reality./ Time past and time future/ What might have been and what has been./ Point to one end, which is always present.”

Time is not a commodity. When time becomes a thing then human kind cannot bear it. The roses are simply looked at. The pool is drained. Time, however, is life. It is always present because time is caught up in humanity, human life. Time is not something that can be clinically portioned into sections. If time is cut into pieces then it dies, and so does life. It becomes an item to be numbered and looked at. It is no longer a beautiful mystery, but rather a bare skeleton, drained.

Our society views time as something to be chopped into little pieces, to be destroyed. We portion our days into little segments for different activities. We move to the mechanical tick, tick, tick of our clocks which tell us to “go, go, go.” Time has been locked into a little box and so it locks us into little boxes of our own. Our lives have become not our own, but rather run by the time cut into little ticks.

If we are to break free of these boxes, we must venture first to break free from a mechanistic view of time. Time is not a commodity. It is our life. If we view time as bits and pieces to be “redeemed” then our life also becomes broken into bits and pieces. A complete view of life can only come when time is once more whole, inexplicably made up of the past, future, and present.