BECKET

(Chorus from Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. )

We did not wish anything to happen.

We understood the private catastrophe,
The personal loss, the general misery,
Living and partly living;
The terror by night that ends in daily action,
The terror by day that ends in sleep;
But the talk in the market place, the hand on the broom,
The night-time heaping of the ashes,
The fuel laid on the fire at daybreak,
These acts marked a limit to our suffering.
Every horror had its definition,
Every sorrow had a kind of end:
In life there is not time to grieve long.

But this, this is out of life, this is out of time,
An instant eternity of evil and wrong.
We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean, united to supernatural vermin,
It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is defiled,
But the world that is wholly foul.

QUESTIONS

1. What differences do you hear in the story between "the private catastrophe, the personal loss, the general misery," on the one hand, and "an instant eternity of evil and wrong" on the other hand?

2. "We did not wish anything to happen," but the story says "this" did.. Write a few sentences on not wishing anything to happen, and what in you wants to prevent "this" from happening. You will not be asked to hand in that which you write, or to talk about it in the discussion circle There is no correct or incorrect answer, and you will not be graded on your response.

3. This question is NOT about the sentences you wrote in response to Question 2 . However, it would be good to share what you felt as you were writing those sentences.