Last month’s visit to Minnesota’s Gooseberry Falls State Park was near sunset, so the evening light reflected off the rocks, autumn trees and evergreens into the white water below the falls.
The third poem in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is titled Dry Salvages. He describes the actual Dry Salvages as “a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.” Eliot’s ancestors had migrated to America near this place and settled and fished in the area, and he references generations of people. My generations have visited the smaller rocks by Gooseberry Falls. Here are some excerpts of the poem with illuminated scenes below the falls that I lost time in.
It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere
sequence—
Or even development:
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.
I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
