in my beginning is my end

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older 

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated 

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment 

Isolated, with no before and after, 

But a lifetime burning in every moment 

And not the lifetime of one man only 

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. 

There is a time for the evening under starlight, 

A time for the evening under lamplight 

(The evening with the photograph album). 

Love is most nearly itself 

When here and now cease to matter. 

Old men ought to be explorers 

Here or there does not matter 

We must be still and still moving 

Into another intensity 

For a further union, a deeper communion 

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, 

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters 

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

~  Thomas Sterns Eliot

from Four Quartets, East Coker