This poem comes across as a little dark, especially since I'm only quoting the beginning (It's a beautiful poem in its entirety, but it's also super long), but I think it's an excellent meditation on what it means to live in the times we do, when human efforts to create paradise for ourselves turns into an "endless cycle of idea and action." How long does it take them now to release a new iPhone that will change the way you live your life?
Anyway, here it is:
Anyway, here it is:
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.
~From Choruses From the Rock, by T.S. Eliot
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