Teasdale & Eliot, Begin & End

Floor Mosaics
at the Kansas City Airport

"There will come a time
when you believe everything is finished.
That will be the beginning."

from Lonely on the Mountain, 1980
by Louis L'Amour (1908 – 1988)

The L'Amour quotation is new to me, and
very similar to these two old favorites
from Teasdale and Eliot:

1. Sara Teasdale
"Nothing is ever ended, everything only begun"

and

2. T. S. Eliot:
"to make an end is to make a beginning"

As I mentioned on my earlier post,
"Body Image, Again and Still,"
I keep mixing them up.
You can see why!

Thus I am creating here a permanent reminder:

1.
At Midnight
Now at last I have
come to see what life is,

Nothing is ever ended,
everything only begun,

And the brave victories
that seem so splendid

Are never really won.

Even love that I built
my spirit's house for,

Comes like a brooding
and a baffled guest,

And music and men's praise
and even laughter

Are not so good as rest.

by Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933)
from Flame and Shadow, 1920

2.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them. . . .

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. . .

by T.S. Eliot
from "Little Gidding" (Part V), 1942

About the Kansas City medallions:

“We all exist in an electromagnetically charged existence through the dynamic of going around in this circular pattern. . . . it’s a new iteration for the medallions as relics or mementos of what has been. They’re a fragment of a whole. So they’re sort of in a limbo state, like passengers are in an aircraft.”
~ Artist Andrew Ginzel

Also ~ on Facebook