'Time present and time past'

Today, Radio 4 broadcast Jeremy Irons reading T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and I took our copies from the shelves so that we could follow the poem in text.

There are two copies: on the left is a Complete etc edition which I bought for P's birthday while we were at university; and on the right the copy of Four Quartets which I used in my Sixth Year at school, complete with pencil notes written in my 17-year-old handwriting.

It was quite touching to read these earnest little notes on this difficult work, which I vaguely grasp only with age and the passage of time and the real awareness of mortality which arrives with both, and to think of that young girl aspiring to have the remotest idea of Eliot's meaning! In that same course we studied King Lear! Didn't scrape the surface ... how could we?

And hearing this afternoon's reading made me think of the Philosophy Course lecture on time travel and of the words of men like Prof. Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson on the true nature of time! Old Tom knew a few things too!