[00:00.000] 作曲 : Eliot
[00:02.375]East Coker
[00:04.983]In my beginning is my end.
[00:08.237]In succession，houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
[00:12.425]Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
[00:16.692]Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
[00:20.047]Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
[00:24.405]Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
[00:28.640]Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
[00:32.779]Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
[00:36.080]Houses live and die: there is a time for building
[00:41.094]And a time for living and for generation
[00:43.562]And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
[00:47.187]And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
[00:50.952]And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
[00:56.732]In my beginning is my end.
[01:00.581]Now the light falls
[01:02.141]Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
[01:04.936]Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
[01:08.157]Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
[01:11.350]And the deep lane insists on the direction
[01:14.156]Into the village, in the electric heat
[01:17.041]Hypnotised.
[01:18.928]In a warm haze the sultry light
[01:21.399]Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
[01:25.194]The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
[01:28.400]Wait for the early owl.
[01:32.612]In that open field
[01:34.778]If you do not come too close,
[01:36.429]If you do not come too close,
[01:38.199]On a summer midnight,
[01:39.859]you can hear the music of the weak pipe and the little drum
[01:43.111]And see them dancing around the bonfire
[01:45.339]The association of man and woman
[01:48.361]In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
[01:51.554]A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
[01:54.229]Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
[01:57.494]Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
[02:00.072]Whiche betokeneth concorde.
[02:02.054]Round and round the fire
[02:04.607]Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
[02:07.231]Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
[02:10.084]Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
[02:13.241]Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
[02:17.346]Mirth of those long since under earth
[02:20.209]Nourishing the corn.
[02:22.132]Keeping time,
[02:24.116]Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
[02:26.241]As in their living in the living seasons
[02:28.847]The time of the seasons and the constellations
[02:32.040]The time of milking and the time of harvest
[02:34.744]The time of the coupling of man and woman
[02:37.453]And that of beasts.
[02:39.963]Feet rising and falling.
[02:42.521]Eating and drinking.
[02:43.980]Dung and death.
[02:48.307]Dawn points, and another day
[02:51.811]Prepares for heat and silence.
[02:54.573]Out at sea the dawn wind
[02:57.592]Wrinkles and slides.
[03:00.409]I am here,or there, or elsewhere.
[03:04.200]In my beginning.
[03:06.812]What is the late November doing with the disturbance of the spring
[03:15.802]And creatures of the summer heat,
[03:17.600]And snowdrops writhing under feet
[03:19.908]And hollyhocks that aim too high
[03:21.803]Red into grey and tumble down
[03:24.134]Late roses filled with early snow?
[03:27.691]Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
[03:30.111]Simulates triumphal cars
[03:32.253]Deployed in constellated wars
[03:34.401]Scorpion fights against the Sun
[03:36.899]Until the Sun and Moon go down
[03:38.589]Comets weep and Leonids fly
[03:41.030]Hunt the heavens and the plains
[03:43.136]Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
[03:45.434]The world to that destructive fire
[03:47.728]Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.
[03:51.848]That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
[03:55.118]A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
[03:59.668]Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
[04:01.937]With words and meanings.
[04:03.745]The poetry does not matter.
[04:05.510]It was not to start again what one had expected.
[04:08.735]What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
[04:12.386]Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
[04:16.060]And the wisdom of age?
[04:17.730]Had they deceived us
[04:19.849]Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
[04:22.851]Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
[04:26.352]The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
[04:29.715]The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
[04:32.871]Useless in the darkness into which they peered
[04:35.246]Or from which they turned their eyes.
[04:38.371]There is, it seems to us,
[04:40.542]At best, only a limited value
[04:42.467]In the knowledge derived from experience.
[04:44.356]The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
[04:48.240]For the pattern is new in every moment
[04:51.040]And every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been.
[04:55.948]We are only undeceived
[04:57.908]Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
[05:01.400]In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
[05:04.348]But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
[05:07.232]On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
[05:11.327]And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
[05:13.820]Risking enchantment.
[05:15.582]Do not let me hear
[05:17.949]Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
[05:21.325]Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
[05:26.416]Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
[05:31.070]The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
[05:34.257]Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
[05:38.883]The houses are all gone under the sea.
[05:43.558]The dancers are all gone under the hill.
[05:47.182]O dark dark dark.
[05:54.390]They all go into the dark,
[05:56.313]The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
[06:00.268]The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
[06:03.930]The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
[06:07.236]Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
[06:10.165]Industrial lords and petty contractors,
[06:12.996]All go into the dark,
[06:15.413]And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
[06:19.820]And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
[06:23.134]And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
[06:27.508]And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
[06:31.554]Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
[06:35.198]I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
[06:41.649]Which shall be the darkness of God.
[06:43.727]As, in a theatre,
[06:45.647]The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
[06:47.730]With a hollow rumble of wings,
[06:49.603]With a movement of darkness on darkness,
[06:52.752]And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
[06:57.213]And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
[07:00.765]Or as, when an underground train,
[07:03.756]In the tube,
[07:04.945]Stops too long between stations
[07:07.447]And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
[07:11.429]And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
[07:15.662]Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
[07:19.350]Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
[07:25.417]I said to my soul, be still,
[07:29.026]And wait without hope
[07:31.634]For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
[07:34.444]Wait without love,
[07:36.727]For love would be love of the wrong thing;
[07:39.496]There is yet faith
[07:41.505]But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
[07:46.388]Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
[07:50.677]So the darkness shall be the light,
[07:53.208]And the stillness the dancing.
[07:56.002]Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
[08:00.207]The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
[08:03.665]The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
[08:06.945]Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
[08:11.857]Of death and birth.
[08:14.572]You say I am repeating
[08:17.105]Something I have said before.
[08:18.604]I shall say it again.
[08:20.352]Shall I say it again?
[08:23.184]In order to arrive there,
[08:25.905]To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
[08:29.592]You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
[08:33.555]In order to arrive at what you do not know
[08:37.047]You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
[08:40.936]In order to possess what you do not possess
[08:44.196]You must go by the way of dispossession.
[08:47.200]In order to arrive at what you are not
[08:49.618]You must go through the way in which you are not.
[08:53.510]And what you do not know is the only thing you know
[08:57.422]And what you own is what you do not own
[09:00.868]And where you are is where you are not.
[09:04.602]The wounded surgeon plies the steel
[09:12.388]That questions the distempered part;
[09:14.447]Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
[09:17.133]The sharp compassion of the healer's art
[09:19.449]Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
[09:22.259]Our only health is the disease
[09:25.070]If we obey the dying nurse
[09:27.141]Whose constant care is not to please
[09:29.969]But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
[09:33.325]And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
[09:37.105]The whole earth is our hospital
[09:40.634]Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
[09:43.032]Wherein, if we do well, we shall
[09:45.919]Die of the absolute paternal care
[09:48.541]That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
[09:52.358]The chill ascends from feet to knees,
[09:55.852]The fever sings in mental wires.
[09:58.825]If to be warmed, then I must freeze
[10:02.011]And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
[10:04.563]Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
[10:09.920]The dripping blood our only drink,
[10:13.310]The bloody flesh our only food:
[10:16.473]In spite of which we like to think
[10:19.059]That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
[10:21.901]Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
[10:28.478]So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
[10:38.762]Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
[10:44.008]Trying to use words,
[10:45.638]And every attempt is a wholly new start,
[10:48.386]And a different kind of failure
[10:51.153]Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
[10:53.669]For the thing one no longer has to say,
[10:56.094]Or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it.
[10:59.697]And so each venture is a new beginning,
[11:02.979]A raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating
[11:07.572]In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
[11:10.739]Undisciplined squads of emotion.
[11:13.560]And what there is to conquer
[11:15.761]By strength and submission, has already been discovered
[11:19.201]Once or twice, or several times,
[11:21.541]By men whom one cannot hope to emulate
[11:24.683]But there is no competition
[11:26.283]There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
[11:30.320]And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
[11:35.886]That seem unpropitious.
[11:37.862]But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
[11:41.165]For us, there is only the trying.
[11:44.210]The rest is not our business.
[11:47.653]Home is where one starts from.
[11:50.917]As we grow older
[11:52.997]The world becomes stranger,
[11:54.778]The pattern more complicated of dead and living.
[11:57.512]Not the intense moment isolated,
[12:00.211]With no before and after,
[12:01.945]But a lifetime burning in every moment
[12:04.936]And not the lifetime of one man only
[12:07.281]But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
[12:10.323]There is a time for the evening under starlight,
[12:14.213]A time for the evening under lamplight
[12:16.686]The evening with the photograph album
[12:18.950]Love is most nearly itself
[12:22.038]When here and now cease to matter.
[12:24.227]Old men ought to be explorers
[12:27.041]Here or there does not matter
[12:30.465]We must be still and still moving
[12:33.511]Into another intensity
[12:35.091]For a further union, a deeper communion
[12:38.869]Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
[12:42.103]The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
[12:47.614]Of the petrel and the porpoise.
[12:50.015]In my end is my beginning.