And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” I:35–48, in Four Quartets [1943], ed. Herman Servotte (Kapellen: Pelckmans and Baarn: Ambo, [1983] 1996), 76.