Home is where one starts from...

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

 Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

 Isolated, with no before and after, 

But a lifetime burning in every moment

 And not the lifetime of one man only

 But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

 There is a time for the evening under starlight,

 A time for the evening under lamplight

 (The evening with the photograph album).

 Love is most nearly itself

 When here and now cease to matter. 

Old men ought to be explorers—

 Here and there does not matter

 We must be still and still moving

 Into another intensity 

For a further union, a deeper communication

 Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

 The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

 Of the petrel and the porpoise.      In my end is my beginning.

--T.S. Eliot

Last lines of "East Coker," the first of his Four Quartets. Photo: Samuel Beckett by Henri Cartier-Bresson.