The Newtonian universe is exactly calibrated, like a chronometer, and leaves plenty of conceptual room for a divine creator to exist outside its casing. Somehow this doesn't prevent me grasping Newton's view of both space and time as absolutes within which the phenomena we perceive can be categorised.

This may well be so - certainly, I lack the necessary understanding of probability theory required to be conversant with quantum mechanics, but then again, I'm also all at sea with differential calculus, the mathematics that fixes in the real world the parabolas described by Newton's laws of motion. I once heard some philosophers of science comparing the Newtonian and the Einsteinian revolutions in our understanding of the physical world, and one of them said that the key difference between the two was that laypeople could intuitively grasp the former's principles, whereas the mathematics describing the latter are so complex their implications can only be comprehended by the scientific illuminati. However, I don't really want to discuss that but instead focus on time itself, and our conception of it. The inclination is, I think, to relate Eliot's insight directly to notions of free will, and hence to moral responsibility - the attribution of which is the thing that most preoccupies us in our social existence. True, Eliot sounds a speculative note with that 'perhaps' in the second line, yet his meaning still seems clear enough - if our perception of time as moving ever forward like a river is purely subjective, and the whole span of time - together with all actual events - has already transpired, then nothing we will ever do or say can alter the future, let alone the past. The third and fourth poems are The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding.'Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.' The opening lines of TS Eliot's Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, were written in the 1930s, but while they may be familiar to many of you, I wonder if any of us have really stopped to consider their full import. The town gave its name to the second of the Four Quartets. Michael’s Church in East Coker, near Yeovil in Somerset, from where one of his ancestors had emigrated to Massachusetts in the 17th century. The ghosts and sounds of children playing that he sensed in the strange mix of past-in-the-present-and-future can still be felt in such places.Įliot is buried in St.

Eliot visited it frequently and the house and its rose garden evoked in him a nostalgia for Britain’s faded splendor. Nowadays people like to get married there, but back in the 1930s, T.S. Burnt Norton (below) is a country house in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire.

Ts eliot burnt norton