The Profit And The Loss

      Rave on, Tom. Frankly, I'm just plain tired.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years---
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres---
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the articulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what is there to conquer?
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate--- but there is no competition---
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

--- T.S. Eliot, from the fifth movement of East Coker (1940)