Light On Dark Water

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.

—Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

As regular readers have probably recognized, I have something of an obsession with the idea of what might have been, and this passage is one that I think of often. If this taste gives you a yen to read the entire Four Quartets, well, you probably want to get out your copy, but if you want to read it online, here is a readable version. No doubt it‘s a copyright violation, but Eliot has been dead for a long time and he had no children.

(Of course the more immediate problem in human life is usually the doors we did open that did not lead to the rose-garden, but rather quite elsewhere.)

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