Four Quartets

Finding a connection to the Star Trek episode and our theme of the 20-minute lifetime in Four Quartets, took no time at all. The first page reads:

“What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.”

When I think of the 20-minute lifetime, I think not necessarily of a life, within a life, which is lived within the span of 20 minutes. I think, rather, of an alternate reality. One that is not within another, but is a separate entity in itself. Like a life that may have been, if different decisions had been made and different paths followed; a life that still perhaps exists simultaneously in another parallel (“What might have been is an abstraction/ Remaining a perpetual possibility”). Here then the question must be addressed…what reality is the true reality? The impossible question, I know. But what makes the life lived by Jean-Luc in Kataan any more or less real than his life on the ship?

This passage also makes me think of the movie 'Sliding Doors' with Gwyneth Paltrow, in which the single act of catching the subway, or not catching the subway, catapults her life into two completely separate directions. The movie ends as the Star Trek episode does, with Gwyn’s two lives finally converging and one prevailing, while slight hints of the existence of the other appear (like how the flute remains with the captain).

Further along in Eliot, I noticed the passage:

“Time past and time future
Allow but little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.”

This made me think of the part in the episode where Jean-Luc is talking to his grown-up daughter and tells her to live in the moment. And what is near impossible to conquer—being eternally in a single moment, immersing yourself in all of its beauty, in the convergence of all time and place—comes to fruition in the 20-minute lifetime. You experience a lifetime of moments, in just one moment’s time; and the line between conscious and unconscious is blurred. And that is where I start getting confused again, and where the first and second quotes connect for me—how conscious must we be to live a life fully? How do we know which reality to grasp, and which to let go? How can we experience a moment, and suck from it all the beauty and possibilities it holds? How do we get a hold of a 20-minute lifetime of our own?