For Us There Is Only The Trying--The Rest Is Not Our Business

The above words are taken from T.S Eliot's Four Quartets, one of Eliot's best work. The phrase has been analyzed by critics of all schools, due, of course, to its brilliance.

In its contest in the poem Eliot employs the phrase to explore the writer's/artist's quandary--the 'trying to use words'; the 'intolerable struggle with words and meaning'. Because, according to Eliot, 'one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say'.

So, he concludes, for the artist/writer, there is only the trying. The attempt is all that matters. What comes after, 'the rest' is not her business.

This, I have found to be an indispensable credo for a writer. Ask any artist with a half-decent imagination, and she'll tell you that the finished product is almost always short of what had been imagined. This, according to Eliot, is due to the 'shabby equipments' with which the artist has been ineluctably equipped--'the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion'.

Then again most of what you want to say/create, has already been said and created. So the cycle recreates--Eliot, in fact, pervades 'The Four Quartets' with this theme of cycles and Time--and, faced with these relentless assortment of mountains to climb, for the artist; for me; for you; for us, there is only the trying: the rest does not matter.

But then again, as with all great Art, Eliot's brilliant phrase can be viewed through more than one lens. Perhaps for the artist there is ONLY the trying; and the REST--the languidness, the tiredness, the languor--is NOT our business!

Happy Steeming all.