INTERVIEWER

There’s a good deal of interest now in the process of writing. I wonder if you could talk more about your actual habits in writing verse. I’ve heard you composed on the typewriter.

TS ELIOT

Partly on the typewriter. A great deal of my new play, The Elder Statesman, was produced in pencil and paper, very roughly. Then I typed it myself first before my wife got to work on it. In typing myself I make alterations, very considerable ones. But whether I write or type, composition of any length, a play for example, means for me regular hours, say ten to one. I found that three hours a day is about all I can do of actual composing. I could do polishing perhaps later. I sometimes found at first that I wanted to go on longer, but when I looked at the stuff the next day, what I’d done after the three hours were up was never satisfactory. It’s much better to stop and think about something else quite different.

(From The Paris Review)

26/11

I have not blogged about 26/11, because I cannot find the words to. There are no words to describe how it felt to be living in Bombay and watching the city freeze with terror, there are none to encapsulate that gamut of emotions, and none to explain why it hurts, it hurts so bad to even look back upon those 62 hours. Only those in Bombay know, and we will never forget the moment the terror hit, the moment the shots rang out in VT, the moment the Taj caught fire, the moment the bodies were brought out of the Trident. I find comfort in literature. I find wisdom and catharsis. But this time in Murder in the Cathedral, I found a parallel. These words describe the terror, they describe the fear, the anger, the loathing, the helplessness. They describe what it feels like to be in Bombay now, but more than that, they describe what it feels like to be living a world in which terrorism is more than a fear. It is a reality.

We understood the private catastrophe,
The general loss, the general misery,
Living and partly living;
The terror by night that ends in daily action,
The terror by day that ends in sleep;
But the talk in the market-place, the hand on the broom,
The night-time heaping of the ashes,
The furl laid on the fire at daybreak,
These acts marked a limit to our suffering.
Every horror had its definition,
Every sorrow had a kind of end;
In life there is not time to grieve long.
But this, this is out of life, this is out of time,
An instant eternity of evil and wrong.
We are soiled by a filth we cannot clean, united to a superpower vermin,
It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is defiled,
But the world that is wholly foul.

Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction, where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.

- TS Eliot from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism