III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

This next section of the poem has resonance and even some ironic humor not conceivably present to Eliot, but unavoidable to see now. So I am going to take a section out of order and begin there:

Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

We cannot miss the last phrase, “in this twittering world.” The ironic use of the word “twitter” for Twitter (like the Facebook’s “friends”) reads like a parody of postmodernism. But look back how Eliot gets to a “twittering world”: it is the 

Eructation of unhealthy souls

Into the faded air.

Like volcanoes, these unhealthy souls are bleching into the air. But the air is faded: it is worn out. This is not a place of healthy life (the souls are unhealthy), but ghostly existence which is not quite alive or dead. It sweeps across the world after the Great War has ruined all and the next war is on its way. 

Note: This is not even the darkness:

Not here

Not here the darkness.

They are not in the darkness, that would be too definite. I cannot help but think of his lines from the Waste Land:

  Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

There is an insistence of modern life, which its getting and spending: Eliot living in the bitter parody of Romanticism. As Wordsworth wrote

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

These people are too busy to be redeemed. Consider the lines immediately prior to what we have considered:

            Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

The language sounds prophetic as to contemporary screen-based reality and life:

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning.

Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

We are distracted from distraction by yet another distraction. And there is no meaning in anything

Filled with fancies – that is diversions—and all of it: “empty of meaning.” It would be difficult to better skewer modern life. And none of this would lead to the anti-capitalist socialism. The problem is far deeper than an economic structure. Notice the line

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces

Marxism is intensely time-bound: the dialectic moves through economic powers through time. But this being time-bound is the trouble: These faces are faces who cannot escape time.  Is “all time … unredeemable”?

Now we can consider how Eliot begins this section: 

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.

He is speaking of a very particular place, the time before and the time after: Before and after what? The still point he has been writing of. A place to get outside of the driving of history. But just on either side of a place of eternity (because Eliot seems to be thinking of Boethius’ understanding of eternity) there is

a place of disaffection
Time before and time after

That before and after comes again in lines we have already considered:

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

So what we have “a place of disaffection”, a time-ridden place, without meaning, capable of offering nothing but distraction.  It is a place of “faded air,” a place without even darkness:

In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.

This place outside of the still point has less than true human existence. It is not day or night. It is a place without beauty. The darkness which is not present in the time before and after 

            Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Is the darknight of the soul: a darkness which “purifies the soul.” Note in particular how this darkness is the exact opposite of distraction and time-ridden:

Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.

There is no salvation is in the twittering world, but all the twittering world can offer is distraction.  It is not even a place of fullness:

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces

What then is the use of this poem? There is a note in Christianity of not being bound to the world

¹⁵ Do not love the world or the things in the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. ¹⁶ For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. ¹⁷ And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

The poem takes us this strand but forces us to stare directly into what this world is: void all illusion. It is a world of nothing beyond distraction. The air is faded, because it will pass away. The world offers neither full joy nor purification. Come stare directly into this ghostly world which is neither alive nor dead.  It is merely

Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

I thought of adding a photograph of people staring into their phones.