Elliot and Valeria

And what you do not know is the only think you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

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.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

Life is very long 
Between the desire  And the spasm
Between the potency  And the existence 
Between the essence  And the descent 
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom 
For Thine is 
Life is 
For Thine is the 
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. 

~ T.S. Eliot was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". T. S. Eliot was a creature of paradoxes, and paradoxes which he did his best to cultivate and sustain. He wrote a jumpy, fragmented poetry about terrifying isolation, while insisting he was keeping with the oldest traditions of civilisation and order. The Waste Land has come to be seen as the poem of the twentieth century, and yet Eliot was profoundly unhappy with that century, and distrusted his contemporaries’ reasons for thinking they understood him. He was the American who thought the English were so ‘very different from ourselves’ in 1917, while at the same time positioning himself as the guardian of the truest English culture.

~ Esme Valerie Eliot was the second wife and later widow of
T. S. Eliot. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in a church at 6:15 am with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. Eliot had no children with either of his wives. After Eliot's death, Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy, by editing and annotating The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land. Valerie Eliot died in 2012 at her home in London.