Sortes Eliotianae

Sortes Vergilianae. Poetry is somewhat magical in Roman beliefs.

How about drawing random quotes from T. S. Eliot’s work? Let us go and make our visit.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

There is a common saying: if you look back and don’t think you were an idiot, you must not have learnt much.

I’m glad to say that I was an idiot, on so many levels and in so many ways, in generally for the past few years, but especially for the past few months of 2023. Although 2023 is now still less than halfway, the feeling is like a full year, or probably even more, compressed together. Or, alternatively speaking, the amount of new data points exposed was intensely concentrated than before, causing a global re-training in the learning model.

A direct consequence of complex system with interconnected layers is non-linearity. In plain English, you cannot force an aha moment to happen. Everything “new” in the sense that it is distinctive from all its precursors is highly probable to come as a surge, not a series of breeze, at least phenomenologically.

But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (alas, I cannot indent it well with markdown)

1. T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
2. Albert Einstein’s General Relativity

Both were published in 1915.

A paradigm shift is not a jump between two opposing schools of theory, but the discovery of a whole new dimension. This new dimension provides a new foundation, generalising all observed phenomena and providing inference. However, every structure and organism will one day fail. A paradigm shift does not mean happily ever after, but another start and another set of challenges ahead which we know that we know nothing.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”